151–160 of 206 posts
Surely its enough to get a Hacker News person to give you a claim waiver or something? I mean, did you try contacting the HN folks?
Actually I did ask them, they (unsurprisingly) didn't have anything like that.
I've checked couple of popular apps on the App Store and here are my findings: - Twitter: uses SFSafariViewController - Reddit: uses custom in-app web view, shows page title and url on top, provides "open in Safari" option through share button - Instagram: uses custom in-app web view, shows page title and url on top, provides the built in share-sheet, interestingly disabling open in Safari, but enabling "Add to Readi…
One key difference (from a legal perspective, rather than a developer perspective) is that all of the above apps first display user commentary and the user is then given the option to open the link to read the entire article. This is an important distinction under the fair use doctrine: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-the-four-fa...
I think it's important to look at the broader issue: "App stores" are walled gardens, policed by corporations and are the opposite of freedom. The web is open and free. We made a deal with the devil when we collectively decided to write and use apps and not the web. This is just one symptom.
"But others do it too" is always a weak defence.
Precedent is important. So important in fact that it is a widely used mechanism in courts of law when an issue is not cut and dry. If you lay out a set of rules which are only randomly enforced then your 'rules' become useless.
It took 3 months of back-and-forth with Apple Review to bypass those legality and content clauses in addition to a “limited functionality” clause. The key features introduced that finally put me past the review board were:
* Embedding a link to Safari on each news article cell
* Only allow content to display in SFSafariViewController (this was desired anyways)
* Allowing user to pick and choose categories of news to be shown
* A progress tracking feature which very simply measures and displays users’ time spent reading
The former two got me past the clauses identified in this article, re: 3rd party content. The latter two helped me to prove my app did something other than display 3rd party content (the limited functionality clause).
Was frustrating to find these workarounds, especially when the App Review board is not very responsive. Thankfully, some kind soul at Apple called me and helped me resolve everything within a day after my 5th consecutive reject.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers only have themselves to blame. We allowed our technology to be used to spam, cheat and steal from our non-tech family and friends. We made tools that helped the bad-guys and did very little when our non-tech family and friends threw their hands up in confusion and cried for help. We sighed. We called them idiots and rolled our eyes. We now have to live with a bunch mostly sensible though occasionally over-…
You were downvoted but this is spot-on, and you see this debate happening everywhere in tech. The entire GDPR was rooted in the (correct) observation that the tech sector could not self-regulate, that actual laws with nontrivial punishment were required to force tech companies to stop shady behaviors. Even YC isn't clean in this regard. They funded a startup called InstallMonetizer that promulgated the drive-by insta…
Governments are partly to blame here, for not addressing platform economies. But some are working on it [1].
[1] http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/image/docum...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Fair Use Doctrine allows someone to share copyrighted material for a limited and "transformative" purpose. Typically "transformative" falls into one of two buckets: parody or commentary/criticism. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all display the entire news article within their app only after it has been presented alongside the poster's commentary. OP's Hacker News Zero app does it the other way around. Cl…
This begs the question of why the fair use doctrine is required at all. It isn't needed for a web browser; why would it be needed for a pared-down web browser? Is it needed for a text-only web browser? None of these is addressed by your original comment or the link, which all presuppose that the fair use doctrine is the only way to escape copyright problems associated with loading a webview with someone else's conten…
A third-party application doesn't have the same permissions/protections. Copyright law doesn't always require the author's permission though. If you don't have permission you can still display the content if you have a legal justification. The Fair Use Doctrine is the set of factors to determine whether or not publication without permission is justified.
The transformative nature of the publication is only one factor, although it's the most important. Another factor working in OP's favor is that the use is non-commercial. He says in his blog post that he maintains the site on his own in his spare time, doesn't charge users to download the app, and from what I can tell, doesn't have any ads.
I really think OP could make some small changes and get it approved by the app store.
This might be a good time to reconsider what made iOS the best platform for this application in the first place. For example, can the app be re-packaged as an HTML5 app instead? What's the compelling advantage for building on iOS for this application?
I'd imagine the compelling advantage is being a native iOS application: "I wasn’t satisfied with the features of the Hacker News clients I had downloaded from the app store".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This begs the question of why the fair use doctrine is required at all. It isn't needed for a web browser; why would it be needed for a pared-down web browser? Is it needed for a text-only web browser? None of these is addressed by your original comment or the link, which all presuppose that the fair use doctrine is the only way to escape copyright problems associated with loading a webview with someone else's conten…
Web browsers have an "implied license": https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Field_v._Google,_Inc . and (I believe, but don't quote me on this) the law was amended shortly after this case to clarify the permissions/limit liability of web browsers & ISPs. A third-party application doesn't have the same permissions/protections. Copyright law doesn't always require the author's permission though. If you don't have permission…
Typically in this nomenclature the first and second parties are the user and OS (or computer) vendor. The third party is an application developer. So typically Google and Mozilla would be third parties the same as maker of the HN browser.
Aside from that, I see no real distinction here. When I launch Firefox, it shows me on my "blank" home page (provided by the browser, not a web page) a list of popular articles curated by its Pocket division. This is essentially identical to what OP's app does. One is a browser that proffers links, the other is a browser that proffers links.