Apr
04

Zite Served a Cease & Desist Order

Mon Apr, 2011 by Derek Mehraban

Zite, a Flipboard competitor, tracks a user and analyzes what the user prefers to read and spend time with on the iPad. Zite then pulls the expected content and reformats it into a handy and compact form for reading.

Major publishers have just issued Zite a cease and desist order. The complaint is not that Zite would take content, but that Zite would take content, reformat it by removing meta and advertising and then repackage it. Those original publishers would then be denied click throughs and even hits in the process.

Zite has said it will comply with the order and instead of offering full articles will offer links to users that take them to the originally published content. Zite had not yet been too big to make much of a difference for the marketers whose advertising might have been affected. Zite is, however, a bellweather app, a sign of things to come. Marketers need to keep these efforts to repackage content apart from the original publisher with a hesitant eye.

Zite Cease and Desist - Mashable

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