The Australian reports that the developers of the Pulse RSS reader app for the iPad were invited to address News Corp App World, a private news industry conference held two weeks ago in California. The Pulse reader, you might recall, sparked a minor controversy last month when the New York Times complained about it using the NYT’s feed while charging $3.99 for the app.
The article quotes an unnamed News Limited executive making a similar complaint about paid news aggregator apps:
"It’s quite controversial when someone takes the RSS feed and sells the app," the executive said.
"We’re not too enthusiastic about letting people charge for our content when they’re getting it for free from us. There would have to be a shared arrangement."
Oh really? I wonder how they feel about the web browser Opera, which charges money for an application that can, among other things, read their papers’ websites? Of course, they do give a version away for free—but with banner ads built in. Does that mean it would be okay for an aggregator app to make money with advertising but not with direct sale?
For that matter, I’m pretty sure there must be RSS readers for the PC and other platforms that cost money—if there weren’t, this About.com listing wouldn’t need separate lists for “Top 10 Free” and “Top 10” Windows RSS readers—but we haven’t seen any complaints about those.
When a paper (or anyone else) gives away its RSS feed, their control over how customers view it ends at the point where they make it available to the public. Like a webpage (which, basically, it is a specialized form of), it can be viewed in any application that knows how to handle its format.
Some people give apps away free; some people charge for them. Charging for the app doesn’t mean you’re charging for the free content that can be viewed with it.
Opera actually went free 5 years ago: http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2005/09/20/
I think the contention wasn’t that an RSS reader wasn’t free, but that it came pre-installed with the NY Times feed. In other words, they didn’t want you marketing a NY Times reader, but had no problem you marketing a tool that could be used to subscribe to the NY Times RSS feed.
Oh, and Opera is free now, but Opera Mobile is not, which I assume is what the author was referring to. I’m sure someone still uses Opera for the desktop… somewhere!
Uh, yeah, what Scott said.
(OK, so I don’t actually use Opera that much and the going free thing had slipped my mind. Still, the point still stands: there are other apps that can be used to view the site’s content that do still cost money.)