Publishing Heavyweights Target iPad Media App 'Zite'
http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/sphE6dw67RM/?currentPage=all
Publishing Heavyweights Target iPad Media App 'Zite'
It turns out that in the internet age you can get in trouble by aggregating the news a bit too aggressively.
An unusually large group of media companies (including Advance Publications, the parent company of the company that publishes Wired) have issued a strongly-worded legal warning to Zite, a relatively new iPad media app which aggregates news stories based on your Twitter and Google Reader activity.
In a March 30 cease-and-desist letter the companies assert that the Zite application is "plainly unlawful" and "uses our content for commercial purposes in a manner that the law prohibits absent agreements with each of us."
The companies pursuing Zite — Advance Publications, Inc., The Associated Press, Dow Jones & Company, Inc., Gannett Co., Inc., Getty Images, The McClatchy Company, the National Geographic Society, The E.W. Scripps Company, Time Inc., The Slate Group, and The Washington Post — allege that Zite's rendering and repurposing "harm(s) our companies and the broader media and news industry on which your application relies for its content."
"By systematically reformatting, republishing, and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale without our permission in your iPad application, Zite directly and adversely impacts our businesses," the letter says. "Your application takes the intellectual property of our companies, as well as the hard and sometimes dangerous work of tens of thousands of people. It deprives our websites of traffic and advertising revenue. We do not know your intentions, but your actions harm our companies and the broader media and news industry on which your application relies for its content."
Zite seems to be taking it all in stride, saying in a blog post that "We don't look at this as an adversarial situation."
"If the formal cease and desist we received from the big publishing companies yesterday was a one line email from the world's smallest blogger, we would treat it exactly the same: we would switch the content from reading mode to web view mode. That's it," CEO Ali Davar, wrote. "This is not our legal position, it's just our policy. Zite is eager to work with publishers in a way that benefits everyone – most importantly end users."
Zite calls itself a magazine, but is more of a enhanced news reader, very much in the mold of Pulse and Flipboard. Zite doesn't provide original content but rather leverages the link economy to display the content behind URLs in an eye-pleasing ways reminiscent of newspapers and, yes, print magazines. It excerpts the first few dozen words of each story and displays a thumbnail picture (if any). The reader can click on a story and see either a faithfully-produced webpage on the app's internal browser, ads and all — or an undesigned text-only distillation, a la Instapaper and Read It Later.
It was not immediately clear why the companies singled out Zite, or why they pursued the app developer rather than Apple, which approved the app and which could effectively put Zite out of business unilaterally for violating its terms of service.
Earlier, the New York Times — not a party to this action — sought to prevent Pulse from using their content by prevailing upon Apple to pull the app. Apple did so, but only briefly. Flipboard has had better luck, and has even formed partnerships with some publishers (including Wired) to publish specially-branded channels within the Flipboard app.
Zite differs from its competitors in that it doesn't just tap RSS feeds for its links. It bases its initial selection of stories by interpreting a reader's Twitter and/or Google Reader feeds, and then invites the reader to fine tune future story picks by ranking and rating each story as they're read.
In the interest of a second full disclosure, I have never been able to get Zite to incorporate either my Twitter or Google Reader feeds. Instead it serves up stories based on broad topics from many sources, including those who are not parties to the cease-and-desist letter. But it still allows me to winnow down the future selection by giving feedback.
Photo: A screengrab of a Vanity Fair article in Zite. Vanity Fair is a Condé Nast publication.
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