Few publishers complain about Flipboard

Business Insider’s Silicon Alley Insider has talked to the company behind the iPad social network reading app Flipboard again, catching up on the aftereffects of the controversy surrounding the company at its app’s launch in July. Some wondered whether, in aggregating content from links posted to social networks Twitter and Facebook, the company was taking more than fair use allowed.

It turns out that the controversy may have been on the order of a tempest in a teacup.

[Cofounder and CEO Mike] McCue says only a tiny handful of publishers have complained about the length of excerpts on Flipboard, and as a result, Flipboard tweaked the settings on its back-end to take shorter excerpts from those publishers, "while we brainstorm ways to standardize excerpting for social media purposes." Meanwhile, McCue says most publishers have been supportive of the way Flipboard excerpts. In theory, the excerpts drive up incremental traffic and revenue to those sites.

Furthermore, a lot of publishers have been in touch with Flipboard about working closer together. McCue notes some updates are on the way, but adding advertising is still off in the future.

I still think Flipboard is one of the most gorgeous apps you can get for the iPad, and if you use Twitter or Facebook it is essentially a must-have.

On a related note, the Nieman Journalism Lab has posted an extensive Harvard report on news aggregation services: their nature, legality, and best practices. It goes into the history of news aggregation cases that have been litigated so far, the arguments for and against aggregation being allowed by copyright or covered by fair use, and how the “hot news doctrine” applies.