When Media Giants Attack. C&D Letter to News Reader Zite

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/

by mikeklaas • 15 years ago

9 9 15 years ago

kara.allthingsd.com

naner3• 15 years ago

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

eli4• 15 years ago

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.

mikeklaas2• 15 years ago

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.

eli4• 15 years ago

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.

naner3• 15 years ago

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

eli4• 15 years ago

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?

When Media Giants Attack. C&D Letter to News Reader Zite

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