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New York Times Forces Apple to Pull Popular ‘Pulse’ iPad Newsreader (wired.com)
183 points by 00joe on June 8, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 115 comments



If the NY times hates people using their RSS feed why don't they just cut it off?

It's no wonder print media is dying when you are willing to spend money on stupid legal fights when all you really have to do is police your own policies better. This reminds me of another HN article from this week where print media was seeking all kinds of govt regulations to prop up their dying industry, That kind of wasteful rent seeking behavior is exactly why most people don't care if the industry dies.

They brought it upon themselves by failing to innovate.


It's not that they are not trying to innovate. It's that they are trying to navigate a rapidly changing environment in a big battleship that is slowly sinking.

The hell of being the NYT is that you're too big to pivot all the time, so you need to pick a plan and stick with it. And if, ten years from now, it turns out you picked the wrong plan, you will feel awful because you lost the New York Times, for gods sake, when all you had to do was follow the soon-to-be-obvious-in-hindsight Plan X.

What is happening here seems clear: the Times is freaking out about iOS apps. Apple has cleverly offered the dead-trees publishers something that looks like the model they know, where they control the experience and the design and, not incidentally, the ad placement. And now the Times gets confused. Do they buy Apple's offer? The way the music publishers did? If they do, will their glass look half-empty in five years, or half-full? Or should they continue the earlier plan and try to compete on the open web where the mass of people are? And can either of these models support anything that resembles the existing staff and properties of the Times?


You bring up a good paradigm, here and it's one that distresses me when looking at the big picture of what's happening with Apple and the consumption junction society we're in now.

Apple wants (probably not consciously, or at least overtly) to be the de facto hub for content distribution, and their hardware wants to be the de facto hub for content consumption. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this (though some of us would like other options), but it's the way Apple is doing this that causes contention among the ranks.

Even though I do not own one (I did spend about 30 minutes at Best Buy reading the NY Times Editor's Choice App), it feels very much like Apple is renting an experience to users, instead of selling one. A casualty of the digital age perhaps? Is the idea of owning content a dead one?

A question for another time.


I wouldn't be too quick to assume that the idea of owning media is dead, or even threatened. What would kill it? The cost of printing and shipping? That is lower than ever. The cost of production and editing and marketing? Those need to be paid for ebooks too, and once you have done that reformatting for print is a minor task.

And readers aren't going to be forced to abandon old media. They must be coaxed. If you want readers on iOS, or Kindle or anything else, you need to offer an experience that is better than print, and better than the open web. Because readers have many alternatives.

I agree that the current ebook model is rental, not sales. We will see how that plays out. My expectation is that the buying of print books will persist, alongside the ebook rental market, until the DRM comes off the ebooks. Lending books is an important use case. Borrowing library books is an important use case. Shifting media from platform to platform is an important use case.


I feel like many of the baby boomers with their LP's but . . . They'll have to pry dead tree books out of my cold dead hands.


I'm with you, which actually surprises me. Now that I own a very nice ebook reader in the iPad, I've bought a couple of ebooks, but it feels oddly like pulling teeth. I'm not excited about ebooks, unlike movies or music.

I have four reasons why I want to buy media rather than rent it:

I want to be able to consume it as I like. I don't want it to be tied to a device that I might sell or that might break. If I get a new device, I want to be able to move my media to it.

Convenience. I want to be sure that, when I need book X, I can get to it quickly.

Future proofing. I want confidence that the media I like won't get taken off the market and disappear into a black hole where it will never be seen again. This happens depressingly often in commercial publishing. Consider the dreadful fate of the version of Star Wars I saw as a kid.

Price. I don't want to have to pay hardcover price for everything. I'm kind of resigned to the fact that ebooks won't be much cheaper than normal books, but I do want them not to be significantly more expensive.

Music and movies have effectively solved most of these problems, basically because they either have no DRM or are easily rippable. Because it is easy to rip music, via the so-called "analog hole" if nothing else, I can always move it to another medium in an emergency. I can back up my music and video onto hard drives or web services. If I encounter a video or song on YouTube that I really like and am afraid is going to go away, I can back that up too. And it turns out that it's hard to stop video from circulating on the internet, so the risk of stuff going out of print and becoming completely unavailable has gotten much lower. Indeed, the ease of online distribution is flooding YouTube with more old video material than I ever knew existed.

In such a world, I'm increasingly happy to move to an all-rental model for most movies and music.

Books are different. They are really hard to rip from physical media: Scanning is a total pain in the ass. The rental ones have DRM. There is no lending of ebooks, and they can't be moved from reader to reader unless the vendors support it. And so, famously, there is no guarantee that the thing I paid money for won't just evaporate.

Which brings up another important criterion: It is hard to compete with the durability of the printed book, which is more archival than any digital data I own. Even my crappiest pulp paperbacks are likely to outlive every piece of digital media in my house. Contrast this with DVDs: They're not just physically frail, but the whole format isn't guaranteed to outlive me: What good are the disks if the players go the way of the Victrola, or even the eight-track player? That kind of makes it easier to sell me on rented DVDs: The alternative to a cheap rental is a dubiously durable personal copy. But alternative to ebooks is the codex book, a medium that routinely lasts hundreds of years, which I can read so long as I still have vision, and which is probably cheaper to buy. (Though not, alas, cheaper to store or move.)


I think Netflix is doing more to prove people are ok with renting rather than owning. Apple is still more own than rent with iTunes and the App Store. Heck, 37signals and their contemporaries proved a lot of people are ok renting apps.


Well to be fair there are very few movies I would watch more then once, while that is not true of music. For books and Movies I have no problem renting. Of course used books off amazon almost feels like renting because they can be so cheap.


Trying to move your music away from iTunes sure feels like renting...I get that it's not entirely Apple's fault, but the problem persists either way.


The print media needs to come up with a system for micro payments, and fast. I am not going to pay for a subscription to NY Times online, but I will hit a TipJoy-like button to give $0.10 - $0.25 every time I watch a NY Times cooking video! This problem is bigger than the NY Times...


The battleship analogy is quaint. The NYTimes is the Tirpitz - the big bad guy who ends up spending the entire war hiding in a fjord for fear of what lies in the open oceans.

Likely to also share the same fate as the Tirpitz.


Newspapers have been around for hundreds of years, news readers and the internet for decades. I almost feel sorry for the newspaper industry who had a working model for so many hundreds of years, and now have to keep up with innovation while keeping up with world events at the same time.

Of course failing to innovate is their own fault. They would have been better to hire smart web engineers and planners from the start. Now they are playing catch up game while other people make money off of content that costs them money to produce.


They don't hate people using the RSS feed (which they sort of have to have to be on the web), but they don't want you to make money off of it.


Pulse doesn't charge you to add the NYTimes RSS feed to their application any more than the iphone itself charges you to do it.


If I'm Opera, for example, selling browser software to people for browsing / reading nytimes.com, am I allowed or not?


I think if you were so inclined, you could probably consider Internet Explorer the same. It's only made available to Microsoft's own Windows customers.


Selling feedreaders is not ok?


not the issue. the issue is that the nytimes was included as a default feed - and is used as a showcase for the app (note that they also make use of the nytimes name, logo etc.)


I get the feeling that they are trying to adapt, desperately even, but they still keep hoping that the internet will someday just go away.


Their blog feeds certainly are. I have to scrape the pages to get a decent Krugman feed.


"The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their Terms of Use. Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. The app also frames the NYTimes.com and Boston.com websites in violation of their respective Terms of Use."

I completely agree with this. People should stop arguing copyright matters on a purely technical level. Intent matters. The intent here is that other people should not make money off the RSS feed. This is exactly what happened in this case, so NYT's reaction is perfectly natural.


That's what I was thinking too...

Then someone pointed out that Pulse doesn't come bundled with the NYTimes RSS feed - rather it lets people add whatever feed they want. Pulse isn't making money selling NYTimes content, its making money selling a way to consume content.


Is there an authoritative link for this? The article is written in a way that suggests that the feed is an integral part of Pulse.

One of the comments says: "Pulse actually ships with the NYT built in."

Without having cleared this up, it's difficult to judge the matter.

EDIT: If wired.com is not grossly incorrect, I do think that the feed was built in:

"The developers of Pulse, Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, are bemused, and are planning to contact Apple to fix the problem. They’ll do this by removing the NYT’s feed from the app ..."


To: ahoythere "By that logic, Safari ships with Apple and CNN "built in"."

Yes - but you bet Apple did actually ask CNN and others beforehand and CNN said Yes. That has been my experience.


More like CNN and others pay to be included, NYT is getting how much traffic for free here?


No, not really. I personally think this whole mess is because they pre-packaged NYT RSS feeds and also used that in their screenshots (don't know that last point for sure, but I think thats the case?), and then they make it a commercial app.

Is one thing for a user to add a RSS feed, its another to pre-package it in a commercial app.

Its not about 'free traffic' its about saying 'hey, thats not cool' IMHO. I would also add, until his all came up I wouldn't have guessed it was an issue until I thought about it more.

Disclaimer: I do work for NYT but have nothing to do with this whole drama. I'm just as interested as anyone here. Oh, and all this is my personal opinion and not necessarily that of blah de blah blah blah....


It's a link. It's no different from being in the default set of bookmarks. If that's "pre-packaging," anyone who distributes a link to the NYTimes with paid software is guilty of the same thing.


Lets be clear. It is NOT a link.

It is a Headline and Summary with a Link. Completely different. I doubt that changes your point or your mind, but lets be clear on whats going on.

I would also add, that this in itself (IMHO) is harmless, but there is also the issue of using NYT content etc in marketing materials (screenshots) for a paid app.

I think that the RSS link/headline&summary by itself is harmless, but that together its a bigger deal.

BTW I don't necessarily disagree with you. I just feel that people are dealing with each issue isolation and losing the overall context.


>Is one thing for a user to add a RSS feed, its another to pre-package it in a commercial app.

The only thing they are pre-packaging is a link. Yes, it displays the content, but it's no different from any other piece of client software in that regard. They do not pre-package any NYT content, which was what I mean when I said it's only a link.

The ad material is the only place where the NYT might have a case, but it seems pretty clear that was not their issue, or they would have objected to the ad, not the software.


It's enabled by default.

It wasn't even a very good example, since Pulse is all about showing headlines with photos, and the Times feed didn't have photos in it so it was just a wall of text.


"Built in" and "included as a preset in the default set" are entirely different animals.

By that logic, Safari ships with Apple and CNN "built in". Along with a bunch of other undesirable bookmarks and feeds.


If i was Apple, I'd release a new version of Pulse identical to the last, except that the NYT RSS feed was missing. Then the NYT would have no legitimate grounds for suing Apple.


Pulse is not an Apple application.


I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't that also apply to any for-sale RSS reader? If it doesn't, perhaps because a user has to add the RSS feed, then couldn't Pulse just do the same thing - ask the users to add RSS feeds (from a "suggested" list).

EDIT: I see the story actually mentions this, and it now makes me characterize this as one of my favorite annoyances, the selective enforcement of copyrights. Big companies get a pass, or a backroom deal, joe startup gets crushed.


And why limit yourself to software? If its wrong for a piece of commercial software to consume the RSS feed, surely its wrong for a commercial piece of hardware to allow such consumption as well. And what about network operators?


That's what I thought too: Since you are using the iPad to display the feed, does that make it commercial?


that makes no sense. can i view nytimes.com via an ipad? does apple make money selling ipads? well, i guess they'll have to issue a total product recall then.

at most nytimes could have introduced something like a "non-commercial utilization only" tag to their feed. in that case the ipad bundled browser would also have to block the feed, since apple isn't giving the ipad away for free.


> The intent here is that other people should not make money off the RSS feed.

They are not making money off the feed - they have other feeds too. They charge you for the app you can use to read any feed.

If that's so, Apple is charging for a device that makes money off, among other things, the NYT RSS feed. All Apple products should then be pulled out of the market. In reality, every computer and networking device should too.


  The Pulse News Reader app, makes commercial use of the
  NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds
An app doesn't do anything of itself. At best, it can be used to make commercial use of the feeds. The app enables persons to read the feeds. One of these individuals could make commercial use of the feed he choose to download via Pulse, but that is not specifically enabled by Pulse: he would have to take additional action.

Now one could argue that displaying the NY Times feed in the screen shots is commercial use of the feed. But in that case, they should argue that the Pulse advertisement infringes on their copyright. Not the Pulse application itself.


I don't buy that.

I can understand if the NYT took issue with pictures of their content being used in screenshots/promotional material (implies endorsement). Or if their RSS was used in any other way to actually sell the app.

I can even understand them contacting the app owners and asking to be removed as a default feed (though that seems irrational it is only their loss).

But forcing Apple to remove it... well that's just a net negative move for everyone.

It's neither a smart or polite move. And the insinuation made was that the app sellers were misappropriating their content - which isn't true!


Do you think the developers intended to defraud the NYT?


Actions have a consequence despite intent. If you put an RSS feed on the public Internet you made that feed public, despite what your intent was.

Saying otherwise, would be like saying that shooting a gun into a crowd and killing someone isn't murder if you intended for the bullet to make it through the crowd without hitting anyone.


Oh? How do the non-commercial creative commons licenses work?


I think we're talking about 2 different things here.

Such licensed artwork (images, icons, etc...) that become part of a commercial application are different than same artwork displayed in an application.

The first is embedded by the commercial developer, the second is initiated and viewed by the user. Otherwise, by just viewing such licensed material in a commercial browser, you'd be breaking the license of the artwork. It's a catch 22 that makes no sense.

Again, the developer is selling a tool to better view content (not selling content). The tool in this case is software. Apple is doing the same, but their tool is hardware and no one complains.


That's not how copyright/licensing works. You can distribute content with legal requirements about what people are allowed to do with that content.


An RSS reader cannot reasonably be said to be "selling" the NYT's content any more than the iPhone or HTC Evo can be said to do so because they're commercial products that display the NYT homepage.


This comment (original work) is copyright DTSI. You are not allowed to read it or view it on any screen besides one DTSI has granted license to. Reading this comment on a screen not granted license by DTSI is against our TOS and will be considered infringement upon our copyright.

If you got this far, you have violated my TOS and infringed my copyright.


Their Terms of Service are unenforceable. You don't need a license to distribute code that asks the New York Times for their resources. The New York Times responds to those requests by saying "OK" and transmitting their content. They're free to stop doing that.

If this were an Android app, there would still be ways to make money off of the app even if Google removed it from the store. Practically speaking, it probably wouldn't be very successful, but it's nice to know that the option is there.


This literally just happened to me today as well. A client of mine has an app where he posts links from time to time to various sites. Users can then click these links and an in-app browser slides over and loads the page. After I uploaded the app, he posted a link to a story on the L.A. Times website, as well as the WSJ website. Today the app was rejected, and we got a feedback response from Apple:

Thank you for your response and prompt attention to the Trademark issue. Please provide documentation evidencing that you have authorization from Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal to include content from their sites. Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal have previously objected to other applications that feed from their sites, and believes that such features infringe their rights.

I thought about Apple's response for a while, and decided that LAT and WSJ should not have this kind of control over who gets to link to their website. Moreover, it's not like the app scrapes ads off of all their pages... the papers still generate page views and ad revenue, which in the end is what they want, right?


The definition of 'noncommercial' is a real mess. Even major 'free' browsers are commercial -- as they come from giant for-profit companies (Microsoft, Google) who ultimately hope to collect profits elsewhere due to their 'free' browser distribution. Do IE and Chrome violate the NYTimes license when they view NYTimes RSS feeds?


Yes, absolutely. As do ISPs. If I buy internet access, and use that access to read the NYT online, then my ISP is making a profit from the NYT's content without paying them. Ditto the companies that made my computers and all their components -- the NYT should sue them all!


The point is not that they allow the viewing of the NYT RSS feed, but that they ship with it by default, and use it as a selling point for their application. I don't agree with NYT's viewpoint here, but I can see where they are coming from. I think the Wired article went a bit over the top in saying that any piece of commercial software is disallowed from displaying NYT content.


If the NYTimes complaint had been narrowly focused on the display of NYTimes content in promotional images/text, or even its default inclusion, I'd have more sympathy.

Instead, the claim they're making suggests it's wrong for the app to display NYTimes content, even at the direction/configuration of the end-user. That's a problematic argument for the whole stack of 'commercial' tools used to read the NYTimes, from the computer and OS through the mobile data provider/ISP up through the browser and feed-reader apps.


I don't know for certain, but I think that IE, Chrome, others asked NYT for permission and don't just go ahead and use the RSS feed.


They'll probably be even less happy with Apple's new Safari 5 reader:

http://experimentgarden.com/safari-5-reader-why-it-wont-work...


Maybe phones that already know the user's credit card number could keep track of a micro-payment each time the readability feature is used on a participating and non-content-obscuring site and send off a few dollars every N uses.


More likely they will just start putting ads in the article content itself.


And that would be different how, exactly?


Product placement in articles.

The BP oil spill has made its CEO so flustered he needed a nice cool Coke-Cola(r) to relax, mind interview. Clearly only a Coke(r) would do, as the CEO is a man of sense, staying away from the slightly detergent taste of Pepsi. Smart man.


Next step: product placement in the news.


What interests me here is that Apple is now the arbiter of these things rather than the courts. If Pulse was released as a desktop application and the NYT sent them a cease and desist then Pulse could refuse and eventually have their day in court to claim fair use, or that they are in compliance with the terms of use or whatever.

However now we have Steve Jobs sitting in the place of the courts. His decision is arbitrary and Pulse has no avenue for appeal other than by pleading and praying for his mercy.

Regardless of whether he decides the app can stay or go it is utterly wrong that he is being given this privilege. I hope that content providers and app developers alike look at this with revulsion and seriously consider other ways to move forward than placing so much power in one individual's hands.


http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1413335

Similar story from AllThingsD, and HNs discussion


Good to see nobody is blaming Apple for this; there are legitimate problems with Apple's handling of the App Store (though perhaps taken too far sometimes), but this is clearly not their fault.


I think this points out a huge problem with the App Store. It shows that if a large company feels threatened by your app, all they have to do is send a legal threat to Apple and your app is toast.

If users were free to acquire software for their devices without Apple's interference, the authors would have the option to continue distributing the app and take their chances in court with the NYT.

Apple doesn't stand to lose much if they have to remove an app from the app store (even a top selling app), but they stand to lose a lot in a lawsuit. The cost of litigation might exceed what Apple stands to make on the app regardless of whether they win or lose a lawsuit. Therefore the App Store model gives companies leverage to destroy developers' apps and by extension to determine what kind of apps are available to users


I don't think the App Store matters here. Thanks to the DMCA, the NYT can have any site taken down (at least temporarily).


This is completely Apple's fault. The New York Times' legal argument is invalid. You don't need a license to distribute a URL or code that fetches a URL. The onus is on the Times to only distribute their content to people they want to receive it. Pulse is doing nothing wrong, and Apple did not have to remove their app. Moreover, Apple shouldn't have removed their app.


You don't need a license to distribute a URL or code that fetches a URL.

You certainly can need a license, if that's the manner in which the owner is distributing it. The fact that it's allowed by the protocol doesn't mean that it's automatically legally permitted.

I think this is a bad idea on NYT's part but that they do have a leg to stand on.


You're wrong. It's automatically legally permitted. If I request something and the New York Times gives it to me, I've done nothing wrong. If I distribute code that requests something and the New York Times gives it to my users, I've done nothing wrong. If my code circumvents access controls, then I might have done something wrong, but that is clearly not the case here. There are no access controls, and that's the problem the New York Times should be fixing instead of making legal arguments they know are incorrect.


The issue might be that there's a difference between the HTTP request and the use case request.

Does a company have the right to dictate how its information is distributed? Even when they make it freely available?

One might argue that the most important part of the story is the first sentence, summary, or lede, and that the NYTimes is forgoing a lot of its own resources if they aren't able to charge people for it. But then -- can they fairly dictate that their RSS information is only valid for non-commercial users, but invalid for commercial users which compete with their own products that support their business?

On the one hand, we might want them to provide this RSS feed. It's better than nothing. It may even be seen as a service for the general public. And we might want to see them succeed as an organization, because we think their function in society is important, etc. So should we allow them to prohibit use of their information for commercial purposes? Even if those commercial purposes are only briefly and independently involved in the whole pipeline of news consumption?


> Does a company have the right to dictate how its information is distributed? Even when they make it freely available?

Yes. Pulse is not distributing the New York Times' content. They're distributing a program that asks the Times' for their content. The Times' obliges.

> But then -- at what point can they fairly dictate that their RSS information is valid for non-commercial users, but only invalid for commercial users which compete with their own products that support their business?

They can prevent distribution of their content for commercial purposes, but Pulse isn't doing that. The Times can't prevent receipt of their content, but they can choose not to give it to certain users to begin with.

> It may even be seen as a service for the general public. We might want to them to succeed as an organization, because we think their function in society is important, etc. So should we allow them to prohibit use of their information for commercial purposes?

No. That would prohibit creating commercial web browsers or any other innovation in the consumption of content that creators freely provide. The trade-off isn't worth it. If the Times' can't find a way to survive, I'll donate money to organizations who can. There's no need to sacrifice more of our rights to incentivize journalism.


I'm a journalist and I agree wholeheartedly. Journalism is valuable, but not so valuable that it trumps our rights or our common sense. If the current stock of journalists want to become the oppressors, time for regime change.


Jobs could, conceivably, call the NYT and tell them they are full of sh*t and refer them directly to the makers of the application.


Sure, but at that point Apple could be held liable for knowingly selling the app (and why you assume Jobs is personally handling this, I have no idea). This is the way almost every content company works: when they receive a takedown notice, they comply. Whatever money Apple is making from the sales of the app pales in comparison to the amount of money the Times' lawyers could wring out of them. If this kind of thing became a problem that was significantly affecting the platform, they may need to step in, but for one-off cases they're not going to.

They're a publicly-traded business; they don't run on fairy dust and unicorn tears.


> and why you assume Jobs is personally handling this, I have no idea

By now, he certainly is.

It would be nice if Apple stood by the developers that make the iPhone/iPod/iPad ecosystem what it is.


Apple doesn't even treat its developers well itself. Why would Apple go out of its way to stop other people from mistreating them?


I said it would be nice. I didn't say I expected them to.


Does Pulse identify itself in its User-Agent when fetching the RSS feed? If so NYTimes could have had their tech staff, not their legal staff, handle this.


In-house legal staff must be free and have to be used to be justified.


I know I should get outraged and amused by this incompetence, but this is just sad.

The NYT company invested in Auttomatic (Wordpress makers; see http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/business/media/23nytimes.h... ) and they got FiveThirtyEight, a blog, under their wing. Clearly they're thinking about what's next in media and experimenting, and then they turn around and do this mindless move. This kind of confusion makes me sad because it's a sign there is still a lot of inertia against their necessary evolution.


You haven't seen anything yet. They'll be moving their content behind a pay-wall in 2011:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...

This move (going after perceived commercial use of their public RSS feeds) is actually consistent with their apparent current survival strategy.


Just noticed that it is back in the app store. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pulse-news-reader/id371088673...


Another great example of how lawyers ruin everything.


I think, NYT and other publishers think Ipad as a possible revenue source for them. Quite different from PC ecosystem.

In future they may have their own custom app, and would like people to buy news straight from them, or they can group together the publishers to create a aggregator app, where the newspapers are making the money, instead of Tech-App Middle man.

It will take some time for them to figure out how to make this model work. Till then be prepared to get a legal assault from them on any news apps.



This is yet another mind-boggling case of people punishing their own fans; we are not talking miscreants of ill will. Judging by the time between the WWDC display and reaction, they seem to have given it little thought.

If people don't like fans using the RSS, truncate or remove it altogether. It is beyond me that NYT, who seem so willing to innovate and understand the new frontiers of technology, would add themselves to the list of these weird cases.

Also, The Barbra Streisand Effect for reference-dropping measure.


What happened is that they chose legal route to enforce their business model, not technical one. If they did use technology , they'd just force login to load RSS feed and that would be the end of it.

As well they use the legal route to put focus on themselves. Like "hey we aren't dead yet!". And while annoying digerati , they managed to spread the word about themselves across so much of a news medium.

Just a ploy to gain market share.


It appears as though the Pulse app is back in the App Store http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...


Good thing NY Times didn't realize Safari can use as RSS reader, otherwise they would have ask Apple to remove it from their OS. Sad to see these companies not grasping how the industry is changing in our times.


From danh "Pulse mysteriously appears again in App store, without explanation. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/pulse-ipad-2/ "


Isn't the solution to rate limit RSS pulls and charge developers for overages? Just treat it like an API and charge for conspicuous use like every other web app out there and be done with it.


So does that mean if you add the RSS to your google reader, google is then breaking their tos because google display ads?


Perhaps NYT wants Pulse to come to a license agreement. Its just business.


1. Pulse includes NYT as a preset in the feed reader

2. Apple shows off Pulse at WWDC

3. Pulse gets download 35,000 times, delivering the (limited) NYT feed to 35,000 eyeballs who might not otherwise check it out regularly

4. NYT forces Apple to take down Pulse.

It's not an issue of misuse of content. It is a preset. Pulse is not SELLING the NYT's content, they are including the feed URL as one of several defaults in their multi-purpose feed reader because they think it's nice and their audience will like it.

Now the app will go back online... and get many more sales because of this exposure... and all those new eyeballs will have to exert EFFORT to view the NYT's feeds.

Say it with me, HNers... s-t-u-p-i-d.


5. Pulse mysteriously appears again in App store, without explanation.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/pulse-ipad-2/


And nothing seems to have changed. The developers don’t know why it’s back and the screenshots still show the New York Times.

Curious story. If there’s one good thing about this whole thing, than it’s that a lot more people now know about this app and will maybe even buy it.

My little theory is that the New York Times saw the bad press rolling in and called up Apple.


The fact that there is some set of companies that can "call up Apple" really turns me off to iPhone development. I certainly can't "call up Apple".


This is no different to any other company. There are some company who can call up Microsoft, or even call up people on the Linux dev team, if they know them.

This drastically reduces who you can develop for, and is one of the silliest reasons I have ever heard to not develop for the iPhone.


Of course it's different. We sell and support (very expensive) software on Linux and Windows. If our customers thought the Linux dev team could stop us releasing updates, they'd be looking to migrate to more reliable platform sooner rather than later.


Well, you can email sjobs (at) apple.com, though, and get some transient Internet fame by blogging the snarky reply. That counts for something.


If a paid for RSS reader violates their TOS, then wouldn't a paid for browser (html reader) do the same?

If apple is such a leader in the open web, then why don't they try to defend the open web in court instead of rolling over without a fight?

I'm hoping the real issue is just a matter of Pulse's marketing material. Should they remove trademarks from their copy, perhaps the NYT would back off.


> wouldn't a paid for browser (html reader) do the same?

Remember Safari and IE are also paid for. Safari for Mac requires OSX and is, presumably, included in its price. The same goes for Internet Explorer, whose EULA explicitly forbids you from installing on anything other than Windows. Safari for Windows may get away with that.


I'm a bit confused. You obviously know that Safari runs on Windows, but you say it requires OS X. Huh?


Quoting myself:

"Safari for Mac requires OSX"

"Safari for Windows may get away with that"


Yeah, I did read that. You appear to be contradicting yourself. Care to explain? What does Safari for Windows "get away with?"


It's not a commercial product. Safari for OSX, however, requires you to either buy OSX or a Mac, driving Apple's revenue.


So you're saying that Safari for Mac is a commercial product, but Safari for Windows isn't? Apple develops Safari because a platform without a free, high quality web browser just isn't viable, but that doesn't make Safari "commercial." I certainly don't buy the idea that Safari drives Mac sales.

But this is just nit-picking. I agree that the Times is being completely ridiculous here. There are all sorts of commercial entities involved in people reading the Times RSS feeds - Apple, Pulse, the users' ISP, the Times' hosting company, various telcos in between the two, the folks who made the routers the packets pass through, etc. The Times doesn't seem to have accepted that they don't have direct contact with their readers online; they're just one part of a larger ecosystem.


I agree it's a stretch demonstrating the absurdity of the NYT demand. Safari for OSX is a commercial product because it comes bundled with OSX and there is no other way to get a Safari to run on a Mac without buying OSX. In the case of Safari 5, you have even would have to buy 10.5 or 10.6.

Safari for Windows is just an attempt to get Windows web developers to test against Safari. No Windows user I know of uses Safari as the main browser.


Well, you could run Windows on your Mac, and run Safari for Windows.


But then you should never use IE's RSS reader.


This is probably a stupid policy on the part of the Times, but they're entitled to enforce the use of their content however they want. "We disagree with their policy because they web should be open and free!" is not a valid legal defence.

If the developers of Pulse and the Times settle this (in or out of court), I'm sure Apple would be happy to start selling it again, but they run a store and can be sued for selling something that knowingly breaks the terms of use of a content provider.


>"We disagree with their policy because they web should be open and free!"

Agreed. That's not the defense I was recommending.


if you couldn't see the fnords before, perhaps you can now


At first glance, I thought 'pulse' meant it took your pulse. Not sure how that'd work.


"just pop it on your wrist"


Bwahahahaha. "Lip my stocking!" [1] with NYT playing the part of the escort.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2dtAi5Za-s




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