All the news that’s fit to print won’t be showing up on your iPad anytime soon. The New York Times has demanded that Apple remove the popular Pulse News Reader application from its App Store because it feeds the paper’s content to the iPad via RSS. That’s illegal, says the Old Gray Lady’s counsel.
“The Pulse News Reader app makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their terms of use,” a Times letter to Apple says, according to a widely published excerpt Tuesday attributed to Richard Samson, the Times representative. “Thus, the use of our content is unlicensed. We hereby demand that you immediately and permanently remove this app from the iTunes site.”
The demand had many analysts scratching their heads, given the new readers and ad revenue that could have been generated by having Times stories easily put on the iPad, two million of which have been sold in just two months. The $3.99 Pulse has been downloaded 35,000 times from the App Store, according to Apple. It was even mentioned by CEO Steve Jobs in his keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday.
“The New York Times action seems odd given that Pulse does nothing more or less than every other RSS reader,” said Michael Gartenberg, a partner at the consulting firm Altimeter Group. “The New York Times can’t stop RSS, it’s bigger then they are. Will the Times turn off their RSS feeds? If the Times feels this threatened by two college kids, perhaps they face larger issues.”
Avi Greengart, consumer technology researcher for Current Analysis, said that while he can understand the Times’ need to keep control of its content, “it’s bizarre that they would ask Apple to pull an RSS reader when the Times is the one providing the…