• Gizmodo, Friday, July 23, 2010 2:43 PM

A social news iPad app named Flipboard debuted this week to some serious buzz -- so much so that it partially disabled the startup's system. Now, however, Gizmodo and others are asking if the manner in which the app uses private publisher content is even legal. "Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn't have the rights to?" the tech blog asks. "Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement."

Rather than rely on RSS feeds, Flipboard grabs URLs from Twitter and Facebook feeds. The problem is that RSS also allows content to be included in feeds, whereas Twitter provides only the URLs that link back to the full website. With similar services, "From a licensing and copyright perspective it's a little bit iffy, but since content providers get at least one pageview every time someone uses [such a service] there has been a sort of truce." Whether the popularity of Flipboard will cause publishers to reconsider the tentative "truce" remains an question.

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