I always love the “strongly worded letter”. It’s so genteel. “Oh heavens, Percy! It’s a strongly worded letter! Alert the upstairs maid!”
Anyway, so Zite is this iPad app that gathers together stories from lots of different sources and presents them in aggregate form as if they’re being published in a magazine together. The idea is that it finds stories that you will like so your Zite is different from my Zite (my Zite would be mostly about Bigfoot and MTV bands of the 80s) (I don’t have a Zite).
But 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.”
Zite says no biggy, they’ll just change the way they present the story so it retains original formatting. No word on whether that will mollify anyone.
Kind of makes you wonder about what can be presented where in something as amorphous as the internet.
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