Blog: Rumors of Zite’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: Responding to Cease & Desist Letters. Yesterday, we were served a cease and desist notice by a consortium of large media companies (initially reported by Kara Swisher).
Since then the issue has become a hot topic on many other outlets, and we should provide our perspective. Before I begin, we want to say thanks to the outpouring of support from our users. Now, I’d like to give you some insight into how Zite works with content: Zite’s content comes from a web crawl, the same way content is aggregated in the indexes of search engines like Google and Bing.Zite displays articles in reading mode, which changes how the page is rendered. Zite: How is Zite not in violation of copyright.
When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage – AllThingsD. A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.
The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below. Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.” Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.
“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.