Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by declan | Hacker News Reader

It would be one thing if all Apple did was send publishers email saying: "We love your writing. We plan to include your RSS feed in Apple News unless you opt-out (here's how to do it). We will respect your copyright and will only display fair use excerpts."

But Apple didn't do that. Instead their email includes language about "indemnifying Apple" from legal liability. It also includes open-ended language about "placing advertising next to or near your content...without compensation to you" in a way that might ordinarily require a license. I wonder if this language would be viewed as legally binding if Apple can demonstrate that the recipient, say, logged into News Publisher to check their settings but chose not to opt out.

On the other hand, as a practical matter, I suspect bloggers will not be lining up to sue Apple in federal court...

[By way of disclosure, I'm a founder of https://recent.io/, which is in the same space as Apple News. We plan to submit our iOS version for Apple's TestFlight beta testing program this week. Fingers crossed!]

> I suspect bloggers will not be lining up to sue Apple in federal court...

Why not? It should be lucrative. If Apple publishes my content without a license that's a clear copyright violation. I should be able to collect up to $250,000 per incident.

As the author states, though, having an RSS feed is arguably an implicit license for what's in it. There are arguments against that too, I suppose, but they have a lot in common with the idea that accessing a hyperlink without permission is a violation.

Apple's on good neighbor ground (and probably good legal ground) acting as an RSS aggregator while giving people a chance to opt out.

They're on neighbor-from-hell ground in handing third parties some weird auto-invoking license for using that party's content. This is the kind of behavior I expect from teenage fan posting a song from a band they like on YouTube, except the teenager is likely to recognize they don't hold any rights and aren't in any position to dictate a license before posting it.

What's the standard license or understanding regarding RSS feeds? If the site has no terms and conditions, is it assumed allowed? If so, wouldn't that go against the practice of explicit permissions used in API?

IANAL RSS 2.0 is Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons licensed[1]

Content on websites is subject to copyright law. There could be mitigating Fair Use conditions to those copyright claims such as truncated news usage, educational use, criticism, parody, etc.

Web server HTTP requests generally bind the requester to the legal agreements on the site {Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, etc}, at least in terms of denial of service (so potentially less extreme).

Any violation of the "/robots.txt" by RSS readers could be considered a breach of Terms of Service (depending on the existence and content of those two documents).

I have not seen the News App and I don't know how it works, but taking copyrighted work without requesting (requesting is opt-in, not opt-out) and monetizing them with ads seems pretty risky to me.

It's possible the article author somehow made an agreement with Apple by becoming an Apple Developer / installing XCode, installing iTunes, creating an Apple account for an iOS device, etc. and didn't know it. Apple _did_ have to find his email address to email him -- typically large multinationals won't cold-email boilerplate email messages as a first point of contact since this would quickly taint their sending IPs on email block lists. I suspect there was already some sort of business relationship established.

[1] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#licenseAndAuthorsh...

Thanks for the info. You are right, it's probably in one of those agreements from Apple. Wonder how ios devs feel about this.

I'd say it's a license to read it. Not to republish for commercial purposes. Ianal.

I wonder if a similar email would work as a defense for distributin OSX on non-apple hardware... well, we sent you an email declaring the terms, and you didn't opt-out... and given you've sent similar emails with similar landmines, you obviously find this to be acceptable in practice, so...

Only issue with that is that judges really don't like "cute" ways of using the law, so it'd be a very difficult job to have it hold up in court.

Presumably Apple has the same rights and abilities to consume and display RSS feeds (and to make money off them) as the author of any paid or ad-supported feed reader.

I agree the part about indemnifying Apple is a silly overreach, but this seems like a bit of an overreaction.

Here's what I don't understand. The music industry broadcasts its product over the airwaves, but if you dare copy and retransmit that with or without adding ads of your own, you're in for a world of hurt. So what is the difference being a blog-caster? Why exactly can't you dictate the terms of consumption every bit as much as the music industry?

You can. It just doesn't make any business sense to do so. Unless, that is, you have a literal army of lawyers lobbying the government and chasing kids[1] and their laptops down.

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/09/music.swap.s...

The irony here is that they don't need to as publishers could get opted in to a class action suit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com