Trademark lawyer Martin Schwimmer, who authors The Trademark Blog, is roiling the RSS world by demanding that his RSS feed be removed from Bloglines, a leading Web aggregator of RSS feeds. Schwimmer's reasoning (with a follow-up here) is that he licensed his blog content under Creative Commons, specifying that it may be replicated only in a non-commercial format, and Bloglines is contemplating adding advertisements to its feed presentations. More immediately, Schwimmer is upset that Bloglines violated other aspects of the Creative Commons license by separating the feed into a frame and stripping Schwimmer's graphic elements and contact information from the feed. Bloglines agreed to remove the feed, and did. Schwimmer apologized to Bloglines readers, and reassured them that the best way to view the feed was by visiting the blog site.

Schwimmer is making an utter fool of himself on several levels. (A collection of stupefied reactions is organized here.) At the top of this man's naivete is the idea that Bloglines alone reformats feeds. Every RSS reader reformats them. The whole purpose of RSS is to make the information within the feed fit into many different spaces and windows. If you don't want your feed repurposed by an RSS reader, and prefer direct visitation to your site, then don't create an RSS feed.