During the keynote address yesterday at the WWDC 2010 kick-off, Steve Jobs touted the Pulse Newsreader app as among the most promising for the new iPad. Of course, this wasn’t the only praise the app’s developers have had recently. The two Stanford University graduate students who developed the app were also praised recently in the New York Times’ BITS blog:
“Pulse is a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator…News organizations still puzzling over their iPad strategies can perhaps derive some hope from Pulse’s success–or at least its price tag.”
Apparently, once the legal department got a chance to look over the app, they were less than thrilled. In just over six hours after the keynote finished, the Pulse app praised by Jobs was no longer available in the app store. So what was the New York Times’ beef with the highly-acclaimed news aggregator? Apparently they viewed the use of their RSS feeds in this particular app as a violation of their terms of service, according the All Things Digital:
“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.”
There is only one problem with this whole scenario, of course. The fact is that there are literally dozens of other apps that use these feeds in the same way, albeit perhaps not in as visually appealing manner. The app was so popular that it had even hit the top of the app store charts a couple of times while being downloaded over 35,000 times at $4 a pop. I’ll admit I took a look at it and almost downloaded it too. So does this mean that the New York Times is going to declare war on apps that use their RSS feeds? How long will it be before we see Apple pull all of the paid aggregation apps without notice, just as they previously did with any they thought were too risque?
Only time will tell, but knowing Apple, it won’t be very long.
