Pulse News Reader -- a news aggregating app for the iPad -- got itself the ultimate stamp of approval yesterday by being featured in Steve Jobs'
keynote speech. A few hours later, however, Apple had removed the application from its App Store, following a complaint by the
New York Times that it was infringing on its rights. Although Pulse collates publicly available RSS feeds, the fact it costs $4 a pop is being interpreted as a "commercial use" of those feeds, and therefore a violation of the
New York Times and
Boston Globe's Terms of Use. Its makers have said they'll be getting in touch with Apple and stripping out the offending content, but it's certainly a head scratcher of a decision by the news company. We wonder if this signals the start of a crusade against
all paid RSS readers or if Pulse has something peculiarly intolerable about it. Visit the source link to read the complaint in full.
Update: From what we're reading, it sounds like what the
NYT is really complaining about is that its feeds are preloaded into Pulse, and that Pulse is using
NYT content and images in its promotional materials, not that Pulse is a paid app. Seems like those are easy fixes -- we'll see what happens.
Update 2: And
it's back! As we guessed, it looks like all Pulse had to do was resubmit without preloading the
NYT's RSS feed and take some new screenshots of different sites, so that's just peachy. Still, it's insanely troublesome that Apple's first response is to just pull apps without verifying any claims or allowing devs to respond -- your store is still broken, Steve, no matter what percentage of apps you're approving.
