The legalities around content re-purposing are sticky issues, and they’ve been raised again thanks to Flipboard‘s new iPad app. Wired magazine asks the question “is Flipboard legal?” in an article today, pointing out the mechanisms around its scraping methods for obtaining its magazine-style layout. Essentially a news feed incorporating socially-shared and popular data, Flipboard is doing more than just creating a reader–it’s cropping content and reformatting it for our aesthetic pleasure.

It doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but depending on the licensing around certain content, some publishers may get upset about Flipboard’s methods. From Wired,

Unlike some similar news apps like Pulse, Flipboard appears to eschew the older syndication standby RSS to instead grab URLs from Twitter and Facebook feeds. While news sources that maintain their own automatic Twitter feeds tend to link the same stories as they do in their RSS feeds, there’s one critical difference: RSS also allows content to be included in the feed, whereas Twitter provides only the URLs that link back to the full website. (Unless, of course, the site only writes 140 character news stories.)

The main reason I find this interesting is because of the number of data-repurposing services that are emerging. Ad inclusion and import options on sites like Posterous have come under legal fire, while bloggers have been defending their fair use of copyrighted content for some time. As more and more services will pop up to address the demand for custom news content (thanks, really cool mobile devices), the true consumer value for widespread adoption comes in the reduction of work on their part, and the creation of something that operates in a familiar work flow.

As Wired mentions, the trouble for Flipboard will likely come full force once it shifts into a monetized structure. The hope is that Flipboard will be so beloved that brands will work with it instead of against it. That’s a likely scenario for Flipboard, but what about the others? Just like YouTube, Flipboard is enabling viral content to remain so by offering it direct to users through their prefered access point. Even their take-down method appears to be similar to YouTube’s. Replace YouTube’s embeddable widget with a mobile app and you get the picture. I can already see Jon Stewart’s face plastered all over individuals’ Flipboards.

For the rest of the repurposing ecosystem? Hope that the YouTubes and Flipboards of the world can aid in the restructuring of prior methods of media distribution. As the digital era continues to force print media’s hand, another market will come about to handle licensing around this kind of redistributed content. It’s the monetization publishers are concerned about–raking in revenue from countless and varying access points isn’t something we’ve figured out yet. But the mobile app world, as new as it is, is also an extension of most everything we’ve been doing with the web. Those legalities dealing with online publishing will carry over to the mobile world in many cases.