I must admit that I totally forgot about this, last week, when I brought up the subject of splogs (sites that steal your content). There is a link on every page of WebKeyDesign.com that points to our Terms of Use policy. Under the Personal and Commercial Use section there is a statement that prohibits any other site from copying our content. However the statement did not mention RSS Feeds specifically. I have now changed the statement to read:

You may not modify, reformat, copy, display, distribute, transmit, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer or sell any information, products or services obtained from the Services, except as permitted by these Terms of Use or under applicable laws. This restriction means, among other things, that you may not mirror on your own Web site, the home page, content pages, or RSS feeds of this Web site or any WebKeyDesign Site.

Though I am sure that this statement will not stop sploggers, it will at least make clear what WebKeyDesign.com’s policy is on content theft.

If you do not have a Terms of Use page on your site, you should seriously consider adding one. Most commercial sites have long and complicated terms, but for a personal site you probably can get by with a more simplified statement. The best plan is to consult a lawyer or someone who knows the law, but I know many webmasters end up using Google to piece together a decent Terms of Use page.

The main purpose of the Terms page is to protect your site from liability, and of course to protect your site’s content from theft. Most Terms pages you find are very restrictive, for example NBA.com, does not allow any other site to link to any internal page within its site. You must only link to the main page. Which is pretty ridiculous, but it is what NBA.com has for its linking policies.

Once you finish your Terms Of Use page make sure it is visible on all your site’s pages.