

When Media Giants Attack. C&D Letter to News Reader Zite - mikeklaas
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/

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eli
It's always baffled me how there are all these mobile apps that get away with
basically scraping content off of other websites (and stripping out the ads).
I guess the answer is sometimes they don't.

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naner
I know this upsets publishers but I don't see how this could possibly be
illegal.

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eli
IANAL, but I think one could at least make a case that scraping content off
another site, removing the ads, storing it on your own server, and then
retransmitting to your users could be copyright infringement.

Put another way, what's stopping me from putting out my own Washington Post
app that scrapes content off their site and uses my ads instead of theirs?

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naner
Ok, that that is not what I understood to be happening. That is definitely
more serious, especially if they are re-hosting the information and placing
their own ads.

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naner
Does anybody know what Zite did that was construed as copyright infringement?

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eli
Based on the CEO's comments about "reader" mode versus "web" mode, I would
guess that they were using Readbility style scraping to display just the
content of an article within the app.

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mikeklaas
I'm the head tech guy at Zite. You are essentially correct — we display
webpages in an optimized reading mode which is clean and loads much faster
than the native web page.

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eli
Makes sense. I'm sure this greatly improves the user experience, but you can
kinda see why it would make publishers unhappy, right?

I guess it's a fine line, though. Presumably, one isn't committing copyright
infringement by using AdBlock or a Readability browser plugin. So why treat
you guys differently? (I guess because they can.)

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mikeklaas
We want create an ecosystem where users get access to great content with a
great UX and publishers get exposure to new readers. The eventual goal is to
have an ad-supported model where both us and the publishers get a cut, and
everybody wins!

It's pretty tough to launch all of that right out of the gate, though, and
that's why everything is free for now. Publishers who are unhappy about what
we're doing can ask and we'll simply display their content in a web browser.

