Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

New York Times Gets Apple to Pull Pulse iPad News Reader From App Store

by Terrence O'Brien on June 8, 2010 at 01:35 PM

Pulse on the iPad
Yesterday morning Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, a pair of graduate students at Stanford University, were sitting on top of the world. Their iPad app, Pulse, had hit number one on the paid apps list, had been downloaded over 35,000 times, and was featured during Steve Jobs's keynote at yesterday's WWDC event. But, today, the two have hit a major stumbling block; their app has been removed from the store.

The slick $4 news reader had attracted the ire of the New York Times, who requested that Apple remove it from the App Store for violating the copyrights of the New York Times and Boston.com. The issue seems to be the discrepancy between the sites' respective terms of service (TOS). Pulse comes pre-loaded with RSS feeds for both the New York Times and Boston.com, and, at least according to the notice from the New York Times, are used as prominent selling points in the App Store listing. But, since Pulse charges for the product, the Times is arguing that the sale constitutes a commercial use of the RSS feeds, thus violating the TOS.

Because the universe has an amazing sense of irony, it's worth noting that the New York Times actually profiled the app and its creators only a few days before the take-down notice was sent and had only glowing praise for the news reader. The developers have said they will remove the offending content and resubmit to the App Store. Customers will still be able to use Pulse to read the New York Times, they'll just have to add the RSS feed themselves -- just like on every other RSS reader. [From: All Things D, via: Engadget]

Update: According to the Pulse team's Twitter account, Pulse is back up in the app store.

Tags: apple, AppStore, ipad, IpadApp, irony, NewYorkTimes, pulse, PulseApp, SteveJobs, top, wwdc, Wwdc2010

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular