New York times complaint sees Pulse newsreader removed from App Store.
Today could see the start of a war between website content owners and RSS aggregator applications. Yesterday APPLE pulled one of their most popular iPad apps off the App Store because of a complaint lodged by the New York Times.
There has been a lot of hype about Alphonso Labs’s Pulse newsreader over the last couple of weeks. The application
was developed by two Stanford graduates after completing a six week development course. Since its release a couple of weeks ago, Pulse has been downloaded over 16,000 times becoming one of the iPads fastest selling apps.
With the app selling for $4 and Apple taking 30% of the sale price, this left the developers with slightly over $40,000 for their effort. Good start and things looked to be going nicely until yesterday.
The NY Times are claiming that because Alphonso Labs were charging $4 for the software and they were infringing on their rights as that charge is interpreted as a “commercial use” of their content and therefore a violation of their terms of use.
I have been using the Pulse application since it came out and upon hearing the news I assumed that the App must be doing something like scraping the article from the website. I loaded up the app and click on the NYT feed to see. All it was doing was reading the RSS feed.
I thought the purpose of RSS is to push content to RSS application so that users can review the latest news from the site before deciding to click on the link and visiting the website to read the article in full. So I can only assume that the violation occurred because the Pulse new reader had the NYT homepage RSS feed as a featured feed upon installation.
It will be interesting to see how Alphonso Labs respond to this. I wonder why the NY Times waited until now, Why Alphonso? RSS Agregators have been around for decades.
