Did the New York Times Just Declare War on News Aggregators?
Updated: The New York Times, like many newspapers, has been trying to find an online business model that works, including experimenting with iPhone and iPad apps, as well as a pay wall that’s expected to launch soon. Now, the newspaper company appears to be sending its lawyers after news aggregators that use its RSS feeds in commercial applications. According to a report from All Things Digital, the Pulse newsreader application for the iPad was pulled from the Apple store after a legal threat from the NYT over unauthorized use of the company’s RSS feeds. According to the email notice that Apple sent the developers of the app, the senior counsel for the newspaper said:
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.
The newspaper’s lawyer also noted in his email that the Pulse app includes the New York Times feed when a user downloads the app, and that the newspaper’s feed is “prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes.”
Ironically, the removal of the app came on the same day that Pulse was praised by Apple CEO Steve Jobs during his keynote presentation at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The app was even written about positively by the New York Times itself, in a blog post that highlighted how easy Pulse was to use for browsing multiple news sources, and how the fact that it was a paid app should give media organizations hope that readers might pay for content on the iPad and other such devices.
It’s not clear why the New York Times decided to target the Pulse app, however, apart from the fact that it is (or was, until it was pulled) one of the most popular paid apps on the iPad. There are dozens of applications and services that do fundamentally the same thing as the news-reading app does, by pulling in the RSS feeds of media sites such as the New York Times — and many of them are paid applications, just as Pulse is. There are also many websites, including Yahoo and Google’s customized homepages, that allow users to embed RSS feeds from other sites.
What may have contributed to the complaint is that Pulse also has a view that shows the newspaper’s website inside a Pulse frame. Although there is no obvious advertising in the app, such framing of a site’s content has led to legal challenges against news aggregators in the past, including a high-profile case launched in 1997 by the Washington Post, CNN, Reuters and a number of other media entities against a site called TotalNews, which embedded news content from other outlets inside a frame.
Update: When asked whether the newspaper’s threats towards the Pulse news app were an indication that it would be pursuing other news aggregators as well, a spokesman for the New York Times told PaidContent that it would look at other situations “on a case-by-case basis.”
Update 2: The Pulse app has reappeared in the iPad app store, according to a tweet from one of the company’s founders, and it still contains New York Times content as it did before the complaint. It’s not clear why the app has been reinstated, but according to a post on the NYT Bits blog, the newspaper is not happy about it.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): What We Can Learn From The Guardian’s New Open Platform
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user bloomsberries
View full post on TheAppleBlog
Tagged with: Aggregators • Declare • just • news • Times • York
Fichero archivado: Computers
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For once I will say something nice about Apple. Jobs in his keynotes said that app are rejected solely based on 3 criteria:
1. non standard APIs, 2. if they fail to operate, 3. if they don’t work as intended/advertised.
Therefore, this claim is not falling under any of those and should have been reinstated!
REPRINT of my commentary on Dave Winer’s “Pulse” post:
These actions reveal how much the #OldMedia types still don’t get how the world has changed. And Dave is pointing out that the NYT does have a fantastic Attention Economy platform that it could easily monetize much, much better with just the least little bit of moxy and imagination.
E.g. start by placing an ad or other (better, more contextually relevant) offer into the end of the BODY of your content (where people will actually see them, unlike the sidebar, etc. ads/banners that we’ve all trained ourselves to ignore). “Problem” of aggregators solved. They’d actually be doing the NYT a huge favor, in fact they ARE doing them a favor right now, it’s just that the NYT doesn’t get it…
Also remember that the NYT gets FREE organic Google listings on just about every search term it might choose to target in virtue of its high Google Page Rank! If you can’t make THAT work for you financially, then I don’t know what…
Understand this: On the Front-End, you MUST Move the Freeline, in order to build and sustain your piece of the attention pie. The NYT already has a huge piece of that pie, but it is too dumb not to mostly let it rot away unmonetized on the BACK-END.
http://alexschleber.amplify.com/2010/06/09/key-excerpts-on-the-follies-of-dinomedia-and-why-you-must-move-the-freeline-from-davewiner/
If were running an aggregation service I would simply drop the NYT’s from the site. Case closed. Their content is commodotized in web terms. Their brand means very little online these days.
[...] Did the New York Times Just Declare War on News Aggregators? [...]
[...] Did the New York Times Just Declare War on News Aggregators? [...]
[...] Did the New York Times Just Declare War on News Aggregators? OK, for a time Apple removed iPulse from the app store. But could they also have deleted it from iPads and issued a refund, like Amazon did with the Orwelll book? Or could they have selectively deleted the NYT feed while leaving the app in place (but diminishing its perceived value) [...]
“in 5 years all news sites worth reading will be pay sites and everything else too. The only free stuff on the internet will be junk and advertising.”
Perhaps in niche markets where the information has an immediate perceived value this is true (Like FT, Wall St Journal or even GigOm PRO). Even then Niche market news websites like this one have special value to advertisers as they get to target the right set of eyeballs (The Ads for Groupon, Economist, and Apple stuff that currently are on this page when I look on it are dead on for my purchasing habits, and likely most of the people on this site. I would argue that journalism’s ultimately weakness is its lack of depth.
Mossberg’s tech corner in the WSJ, while widely read has nothing you couldn’t pick up from skimming arstechnica, t-crunch and the occasional blog. News aggregation points like drudge, Digg and Slashdot that pull together interesting content from these Niche fringes. I find them to be much more interesting than what a reporter finds is interesting (as well as the crowd sourced ones have people writing summaries who actually sometimes understand the tech better and don’t make silly mistakes).
Its ironic that Journalism one of the greatest early adopters of the communications revolution, is often so far behind these days (case in point, I will throw up if I see one more use of the word “cyber” in a newscast. local ABC affiliates you know who you are.).
[...] -GigaOm: Did the New York Times Just Declare War on News Aggregators? [...]
[...] SEE: http://gigaom.com/2010/06/08/did-the-new-york-times-just-declare-war-on-news-aggregators [...]
[...] SEE: http://gigaom.com/2010/06/08/did-the-new-york-times-just-declare-war-on-news-aggregators [...]
[...] Did the New York Times Just Declare War on News Aggregators?"The New York Times, like many newspapers, has been trying to find an online business model that works, including experimenting with iPhone and iPad apps, as well as a pay wall that’s expected to launch soon. Now, the newspaper company appears to be sending its lawyers after news aggregators that use its RSS feeds in commercial applications." The NY Times sends the lawyers after the people behind the Pulse news-reader for iPad, because it constitutes commercial use of their RSS feeds (nytimes rss business_models aggregation ) [...]
That is what NYT is doing currently. They do optimize for conversion.
What Pulse is doing is taking the link from the RSS and then loading it using the built webkit to display the story in browser format. Since they default to “text” view, they are also stripping the content when people load up stories.
NYT was not shortsighted. They did the right thing. Who would have planned for the iPad with built in webkit rendering back when RSS was big and people like the NYT got on board.
Again… Safari is a “free” product.
Further, Apple is overlaying the stripped version on top of the original article, for which you must see the article in web format in the browser before you can even switch to Reader mode.
Pulse is promoting the stripped version as a benefit to encourage their users to ignore ads, Pulse is charging money for an app that relies entirely on someone else to produce content to make the reader even worth using, Pulse is not sharing any of that money with their content providers, and Pulse is defaulting the view in their app to show the stripped version, which hurts the people who are providing them free content.
I bought Pulse. I like using it. But come on, the New York Times has a reasonable position here. I think they have every right to be upset.
Atilla, when it comes to stripping out the ads, Apple’s latest version of the Safari browser does exactly the same thing with its new “Reader” feature.
Atilla – Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer all allow you to save an RSS feed as a bookmark, creating a drop-down list of the summaries of recent entries of that RSS feed. It’s not a very high-profile feature, but it is there in all 3 browsers. By definition, it is exactly what the NYT and Globe’s Terms of Use prohibit.
That said, I have to side with the NYT and Globe on this. Technically, it’s a violation of their Terms of Use.
The sad takeaways from this are:
- Almost all content on the web is covered by a license. If you’re a developer that re-publishes content, you need to be aware of and respect those licenses. If your app is a content viewer that can access thousands of sources, how do you begin to police this?
- Content creators are making essentially no efforts to actually protect their content from these sorts of violations. Arguably, they’re encouraging it by making RSS feeds available at all without making ‘reasonable effort’ to control access. Legally, they may be on shaky ground if this were brought to trial.
- By positioning itself as the “controller” of all App Store content, entities who have grievances with App Store content have an easy path to address those grievances. If Pulse were available through other channels, the NYT/Globe would have contacted the developers directly with a C&D for use of their content and the developer likely would have just removed those feeds from the app and their marketing materials, released a new version and this would be a much lower profile incident. The platiff entities aren’t going to spend time on “fix it” solutions requiring further review, they want “make it go away so we can move on” solutions. IE – “Remove it from the app store forever”. Unfortunately, Apple’s (prudent) response is almost guaranteed to be to comply with a legally viable request (particularly from a high profile company) rather than defend any developers (even high profile developers).
The end result being a high profile mess that’ll surely cost the NYT/Globe a lot more than if they’d let it slide (which they can’t do – failure to enforce = invalidated ToU).
[...] Times Company’s objection to the commercial use of the RSS feeds raised eyebrows among tech bloggers. Software companies have been selling PC-based news reader applications for [...]