When the New York Times objected officially to Apple about an iPad application called Pulse they shot themselves in the foot. Pulse is an innovative yet simple RSS news aggregator for the iPad.
For whatever reason the New York Times has decided to target Pulse and now perhaps anyone who aggregates their news feeds. According to Kara Swisher at All Things Digital, a Wall Street Journal web site, Apple received a letter from the New York Times which stated that "The New York Times Company believes your application named 'Pulse News Reader' infringes The New York Times Company's rights.".
But what about all those other applications, and their hundreds if not thousands, which aggregate news and some who charge for their applications? Will the New York Times go after all of them as well? After all the New York Times publicly makes their RSS feeds available. What's the point if you can't use them.
This brings me to another point. If the New York Times will do this what's stopping them from going after Apple themselves? After all I bought an Apple computer, it came with the Safari web browser, I paid for an update to the Apple operating system and guess what? The Apple Safari browser has built in news aggregator and display function which you guessed it, can access the same New York Times feeds. Since I'm paying Apple for the Safari application then shouldn't the New York Times target Apple itself. It's ridiculous.
One issue which could be at the heart of the problem is the fact that Pulse allows the user to view the web site page of the originating RSS link in a framed browser. This is a controversial practice as Mathew Ingram at GigaOm points out. However in this case Pulse does not frame the page with ads but only simple navigation tools to get back to the where you where in Pulse.
Pulse should be allowed back into the iTunes store with the only modification that the New York Times not be one of the default feeds. Then if the user wants the New York Times, and I don't know why, they can add it manually.
Update - And this afternoon the Pulse iPad is back in the iTunes store after removing the pre-loaded New York Times RSS feed.
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