5 posts and columns on terms of use

Meet the Two Grad Students Who Freaked Out the NYT–The Pulse iPad App Creators Speak!

in News on June 8, 2010 at 6:17 pm PT

The first thing to strike you about the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the banned and then unbanned news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, is how they look like an advertisement for all that is good about entrepreneurship. Sweet-natured, slightly naive, energetic and very product focused, they are the last techies you’d choose to be the ones who got the New York Times in enough of a tizzy to force Apple to pull the news aggregator from its App Store. See for yourself in this video.

Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs's Praise in Morning…Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains

in News on June 8, 2010 at 12:53 am PT

Yesterday morning, the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the hot news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, were ecstatic to be mentioned first–for being among the most promising developers for the new tablet device–by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his keynote address to the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. But by afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, when Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.” Pulse was down completely by 6:30 pm PT last night.

Is the AP Adding DRM to the News? Not Yet.

in Media on July 23, 2009 at 1:03 pm PT

Here’s the next step in the Associated Press’s attempt to adapt to the reality of the Web: It’s going to try to keep tabs on its stories, photos and videos via a “news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use.” At first blush, the AP’s description of the program sounds a lot like an attempt to implement digital rights management–a lock-and-key system–for the news. But at least in this iteration, that’s not the case.