Apple Pulls Pulse Newsreader at Behest of NY Times

Wow, I actually feel sorry for Apple on this one. The company’s usually on the other end of the legal-bs bullying.

Just one day after Steve Jobs mentioned the Pulse newsreader during his WWDC keynote, Apple was forced into pulling it from the App Store thanks to some legal shenanigans. The Pulse reader is an iPad-based reader that aggregates news feeds like any good newsreader should. Somewhere in that simple, ubiquitous process, the NY Times has found a fault. The publisher’s legal counsel sent a request to Apple citing unlicensed use of content.

Here’s a little piece: “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 commercial use is because Pulse is a $4 app, and apparently the NY Times is also displayed in advertising for it.

Apple acquiesced and pulled the app.

In the day and age of sinking print publications, you would think that the NY Times would be happy that it’s getting readers anywhere that it can. Apparently, the terms of use of its RSS feeds are more important than people actually reading the paper.

The developers of Pulse plan to pull the NY Times’ reader from the app in order to work around the issue. So, in other words, NY Times will be losing any readers that it could have gained through the app–job well done. [via Wired]