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Stupid question, what's the legality or the "rules" on extracting pic + chunk of text from random websites?

Are there any rules I presume there must be?

Well, we're talking about copyright. And so long as you're not re-publishing anything, you're definitely fine.

Instapaper arguably is republishing, though the copies are private to each user. I suspect they could still be in trouble if sued, though.

This is one of the reasons Readability links you back to the original article when you share document inside the service. It keeps a small overlay at the top which you can use to make the page more readable again.

Slightly off topic: I've been playing around with an idea for a service that would be able to share content this way - would make reading a lot more fun again.

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