Behind Companies

Ben Brooks:

Readlists is a service to allow people to completely avoid reading a content producers site, allowing them to repackage and redistribute their content all without permission.

Ben is right. There’s a difference between user-initiated time shifted reading like what Instapaper does, and a for-profit entity like Readability repackaging content without permission and redistributing it under the guise of “potential payments.”

There is a copyright in my footer for a reason: I still own all the rights to what is published here. Another company may not repurpose what I write for their own means. Plain and simple.

This is the same as mindset as a major publication stealing stealing what I write, publishing it, and giving me a minor attribution at the bottom, all without asking. It’s wrong.

I like how Marco has handled this problem in Instapaper. He runs a site called The Feature and built it into Instapaper. The site links to the original article, and if I go straight to The Feature within Instapaper, every article opens up the original page and then I can hit the Read Later button.

Even if you don’t make money off your site’s impressions, as a writer, you still would like to know how many people are reading what you write.

In the Readlists case, you’ve 100% lost ownership of what you made.

This is bullshit.

More so: I think Readability is running into another problem. There are only so many features you can build into time-shifted reading. Marco hasn’t added too many features to Instapaper product in the last 4 years, but when you have a staff of many and funding, people need something to do.