Flipboard CEO's claim: We're not building a business "on the backs of publishers" Updated with additional comments from Flipboard’s Mike McCue.
Flipboard is an iPad app that republishes articles your friends link to on Twitter and Facebook in pretty, magazine-like templates. It does this by violating publishers’ copyrights and hoping they’ll forgive it, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue tacitly admitted today. “We want to build a business with publishers, not on the backs of publishers,” McCue said in response to a question I asked about whether Flipboard had the legal right to republish content in its app. McCue was on stage at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco. Flipboard has changed some of its practices since its launch first raised copyright questions.
There are legal precedents allowing the display of short, text-only excerpts and thumbnail images from websites. The answer, of course, is that it can’t. McCue’s other defense: Publishers seem to like Flipboard. It seems like a step in the right direction. How does Flipboard deal with copyright issues when it grabs content from publishers. Why doesn't Flipboard violate copyright laws by taking more from stories than fair use allows. Flipboard and Copyright an Opt Out Approach. Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing and others this week have introduced the red herring of copyright infringement in reviewing the new IPad application Flipboard.
(Flipping the bird at Fair Use is how Rob wrote about it.) It seems very late in the Fair Use game for anybody to be seriously complaining about the aggregation of content. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, times a day content is scraped, republished, pasted, aggregated, mashed and digested by millions of individual and business users. As a copyright attorney, I would find it laughable, were Flipboard to retain me as its attorney, to suggest that their particular aggregation model was somehow the tainted one that could not withstand legal challenge. Flipboard does not need any one content provider in its streams. As for Flipboard the application, some say is is good, but not great. About Flipboard and reading surfaces. Is Flipboard Legal? - Gizmodo. Flipboard Wades Into Murky Copyright Waters Where Google Lives.
Flipboard, a new content-browsing app for the iPad, emerged on the scene this week to much acclaim — so much that the service was hobbled by the demand.
But uptime issues are just one of the thorns that Flipboard has to worry about as it tries to build a company around its application. That’s because the iPad app also raises some fairly sticky issues related to copyright, as Joel Johnson has pointed out in a post at Gizmodo. In many ways, Flipboard has opened itself up to the same kinds of legal headaches that Google has been battling related to Google News and Google Books. When Flipboard first appeared, I assumed that it was essentially a new kind of RSS reader, and that it would pull articles or blog posts in via the public content-distribution feeds from various sites that people linked to in their Twitter or Facebook streams.
This raises the same kinds of issues Google News has been wrestling with for several years and that have gotten it into hot water with content producers.