I … am not using readability, not being publisher. But I know what I feel when a man take my stuff and make money out of it without my permission, and then another person tells me that it’s not my money.

I WOULD BE MAD if someone do that. I even could stab someone if that happened in my real life

I don’t see #2 as an issue, other than Gruber thinks no one should attempt to collect money on his behalf. Or that he shouldn’t have to sign up to collect free money. Or something.

Nik: That’s really interesting! Hadn’t heard of the private copying levy before. I went through USC Chapter 10 though and I don’t see any reference to VCRs. It seems to be aimed at audio recordings. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to video recordings too, somehow, but I just couldn’t find it in the code. Are you aware that it covers VCRs?

They actually do – the private copying levy as part of the Fairness in Music Licensing Act. 2% of price of devices and 3% of all media goes back to the content creators. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

What I mean is, I think the situation here is closer to, for example a VCR company that pre-recorded your favorite shows for you, edited all the commercials and smoothed over the whole recording to make it seamless.

Now you’ve stopped paying for cable and just paid for this service.

I pay and use Instapaper daily, whose main purpose is reading on the tube. It’s a metaphorical DVR to overcome network failings. Stripping ads we never see anyway is a matter of bandwidth and storage limitations and good, functional design.

Wasn’t Readability essentially a tool to help people in their 40s who couldn’t read web pages easily because the type was too damned small, and the designer did not take enough care to ensure embiggening worked right? Years ago I wrote them an emotional fan note of thanks because design fucking matters. The physical world, of course, is a micro-type catastrophe. Readability = reading glasses.

(I must say #2 seems like an admission of guilt about something not quite defined, a recovered memory from the 20th century perhaps. It undermines the faith of customers, investors, publishers, everybody. It seems crazy and foolish and anachronistic.)

Michael: I agree that the wording of their pitch is problematic. As I mentioned to the commenter above, I would much rather it work more like Newman’s Own. When you buy a Newman’s Own product, you know you are first and foremost buying the product, and then proceeds from the product will then be redistributed fairly amongst x organizations.

I look at it this way: Readability is two things, an ad-stripping text reader app, and a redistribution network.

The text-reader app is free, and in exchange for providing this reading tool, they take a cut of my donations to publishers. In this respect, they are a middle-man. They tax me 30% for this dual service: they give me a nice interface and they handle the difficult challenge of micro-payments to a bunch of different publishers.

This is an important point: I’m not giving Readability money to use as they see fit (as you suggest), but rather we have agreed that they will take 30% of what I am donating.

They market this as 30% us/70% them, so I consider that the terms of our agreement. Oh, but wait, there’s that sneaky word in there: “earmarked.” Hrm. Don’t you think it’s kind of messed up that these issues have been on the table for over a year, yet you still have to postulate what they’re doing with this unclaimed but “earmarked” cash? I mean, come on. It is frankly inexcusable.

If they had a clear policy with a bunch of conditions that detail what they do and how they end up keeping some greater percent than 30%, then I would insist on open accounting that detailed what percent they actually keep. Am I actually being taxed at 30% or 50% or 80%? This seems important.

One of the reasons why this matters so much is scale. Let’s talk actual dollars since the abstraction of %s obfuscates the issue. At $1.40 per month in “subscriptions”, they get $5 per year, which is the cost of the Instapaper app. At their recommended $5 subscription rate, they make $18 off of me, which happens to be roughly close to the $17 Marco would make if I bought Instapaper and subscribed ($3/3 months) for a year. At $10/month, they make $36 off me, or wait, maybe they make $60 off me, or $100 off me, since I have no idea what was “earmarked.” Needless to say, I don’t want Readability to make $100 off my $120 donation to content creators.

That one of their most prominent advisors can pen two thousand words of fanboy this and can’t we all get along that without ONCE ADDRESSING THIS CENTRAL CONCERN tells me everything I need to know.

Except of course that publishers invest the time and resources into developing content of such high quality that users will pay money simply to have it delivered in a format they prefer.

As long as servers talk to individual browsers the broadcasting analogy doesn’t hold up. Site owners have a 1:1 relationship with their readers, and choosing to keep their site open so that any reader can get the site’s content does not, in so doing, mean giving up copyright or the ability to prevent others from hosting their content and monetizing it, even if the rehoster graciously offers to cut the publisher in on the deal.

Betamax and VCRS or DVRs record the broadcast signal into a medium that you could do things with, but they didn’t and don’t make it B/W or sepia and 2x fwd’d doesn’t remove the commercials.

Grover: Interesting point. From my reading, it appears a few of the justices were conflicted as to whether use inside the home by the end user to record TV was “fair use” but they were then persuaded to toss that issue aside since the lawsuit wasn’t brought against end users in the first place. Regardless, however, it’s generally accepted today that making a personal copy of something (whether movie, tv show, printed piece) for your own personal use later is “ok”. To your point, I’m not sure where this is codified, but it seems like the de-facto standard.