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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
