Apple has reportedly pulled an app that Steve Jobs touted during his WWDC keynote after The New York Times complained that it infringed upon its copyrights.
Jobs highlighted the "Pulse News Reader" app during a Monday speech that marked the introduction of the new iPhone 4. It is basically a fancy RSS reader developed by two Stanford students and has been available in the App Store for $3.99 for about a month. By Tuesday night, however, it had been removed from the store completely, All Things D reports.
The blog posted a Monday note from Apple to Pulse developers, which said that The New York Times believed that Pulse infringed on the newspaper's rights. Richard Samson, the paper's senior counsel, wrote to Apple on June 3 and said The New York Times opposed Pulse because it "makes commercial use of the NYTimes.com and Boston.com RSS feeds, in violation of their terms of use."
Samson noted that the NYT feed came pre-loaded with the Pulse app, and the NYT content was "prominently featured in the screen shots used to sell the app on iTunes."
As All Things D noted, the Times ironically wrote a blog post about Pulse on June 1, in which it described the app as a "stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator."
Developers Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta sold about 35,000 copies of Pulse, according to the NYT blog post, which equals about $40,000 in revenue after deducting Apple's 30 percent share.
