One of the craziest online screw-ups by a media company is currently playing out. Pulse News Reader by Alphonso Labs is a visually engaging RSS reader for iPad. Rather than being primarily text-based, it aims to pull in imagery for each article, providing a more aesthetic and elegant experience than competing apps when you’re working through feeds.

Pulse has been riding high: it’s well-rated in the App Store and Apple CEO Steve Jobs mentioned it at WWDC on Monday. But then things started to go crazy. The New York Times wrote a story about Pulse, but this only alerted the publication’s legal department, who forced Apple to pull the app.

Twitter went mental, bloggers were in uproar, and the app returned. Had sanity prevailed? Nope. Times spokesperson Robert Christie told the world: “We think it has been reinstated by error, and we have asked Apple for an explanation.” In a totally surreal twist, the Times itself is now covering the ongoing spat.

So what did Pulse do to anger the Times? Apparently, it had the audacity to ‘frame’ the site’s content when a full article was accessed, and it’s also a commercial product. The Times’s legal brains and talent (and I use those words loosely) decided this breached two of the absolute no-no terms regarding Times content. The fact that Pulse acts like almost every other RSS reader and Twitter client out there doesn’t entirely seem to have escaped the Times, but in one of the most boneheaded pieces of reasoning I’ve ever seen, Christie said that if other commercial RSS readers were making use of Times content, they were most likely doing so under an agreement with the The New York Times Company.

This is clearly bullshit of the highest order. No RSS reader developers gain permission/agreements with content providers, because doing so would take years, and there’s an assumption that feeds are provided freely, so you can access content. Still, this is The New York Times Company, and I had a run-in with its legal team in the late 1990s when I had the sheer cheek to ask permission to reprint (with full accreditation and a link) on my non-commercial site a single gig review from the Boston Globe. (Net result: a price-list and a legal threat for something I’d not even done.)

So, The New York Times Company, here are my helpful hints for you. Choose one of the following:

1. Stop using your heavy-handed legal morons to drag your company back into the 1990s, and recognise that if you provide RSS feeds, applications are going to—shock!—use them. And, you know, some people making apps that do might even want to eat, and so they’ll charge for their product (like you do), but they’re not charging for your content, you utter dimwits.
2. Remove all your feeds, which deals with the problem nicely, since no evil RSS readers and Twitter clients will then be able to ‘frame’ your content in the manner you find so abhorrent. Of course, you’ll then be called Mr Stupid of Stupid Town in the Stupid Corner of the Stupid Bit of the internet, and you’ll lose a load of readers, but, hey, you brought that on yourselves.

Given that someone at the BBC appears to have flicked the Universal Stupid Switch and engaged the Screw Impartiality Field, and with the right-wing press now in a total frenzy over the possible collapse of a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition, here are some handy helpful hints for anyone who thinks this is all so unfair:

1. The United Kingdom is not a presidential system. This country does not and has never elected a Prime Minister. We elect MPs, who form voting blocs, and those blocs then form the government. Typically, one of the senior members of the biggest party becomes Prime Minister. Sometimes this person is known before the election and sometimes not. Regarding Gordon Brown specifically, he was returned after the 2010 election with one of the biggest majorities in the UK, and so the only ‘election’ for him that mattered was not only sound but also extremely solid.
2. Our head of state is the Queen, not the Prime Minister. And she’s unelected, natch.
3. The Tories did not ‘win’ the election. The only way one could conceivably say a party ‘won’ a British election was if it got a majority of the vote and/or a majority of the seats in the Commons. The Tories got neither. They got the most votes (although by a smaller margin than people seem to think, because most people aren’t bothering to, you know, read the figures), but that’s all. That’s not, under the UK system, a ‘win’.
4. The Tories do not have a mandate to govern. The Tories seem to think it’s terribly unfair that they’re not already running the country, but the unwritten constitution of the UK deems that they should not even have first dibs in trying to form a government. As Prime Minister, it’s actually Brown who could have had first crack at forming a government, unless he’d resigned. That he didn’t was an astonishingly sly political manoeuvre from Brown. The Liberal Democrats were able to fulfil a campaign promise (talk first to whichever party got the most seats), and the Tories showed their hand, which Labour could then better.
5. Clegg isn’t two-faced. The Daily Mail today unsubtly calls Clegg two-faced due to him having the audacity to speak to Labour and the Tories. He only said he would talk to the Tories first (against tradition—see point 4), not that he’d definitely do a deal with them. In fact, it would be utterly irresponsible and undemocratic for the Liberal Democrats to not speak to Labour and weigh up the options. Also, ignore the Tory press’s chants of the Liberal Democrats being self-serving regarding the PR red-line. PR threatens the Tories, hence why the Murdoch machine is spooked. It would be far harder for the Tories to get into power under a PR system (although not impossible if the party modernised a little). From a UK standpoint, though, PR will return MPs more in line with what you voted for, which should be the aim of a modern democracy.
6. The Tories have not offered the Liberal Democrats anything worth a damn regarding electoral reform. It’s clear from news reports that until Brown said he’d quit later this year the Tories had offered the Liberal Democrats nothing on electoral reform. They’ve now offered a referendum on AV, a system that would change the balance of the Commons, but not by a great deal. It’s not proportional representation, and it can in some cases actually boost seat numbers for larger parties. To that end, this isn’t compromise by the Tories—it’s a gamble that the public will get angry at the Liberal Democrats for not accepting it, because the public doesn’t realise the offer is worthless.
7. Labour has offered the Liberal Democrats something worth a damn regarding electoral reform. Labour’s offered AV not as a referendum, but as a bill, which should get through the Commons with the help of other minority parties. They’re then offering a referendum on PR, which, presumably, would enable us to move from AV to AV+ or STV. I would expect any Lab/Lib ‘contract’ to ensure there’s no Labour-wide anti-PR campaign.
8. A Lab/Lib coalition wouldn’t necessarily fail. The numbers are such that a Con/Lib coalition would be strong if everyone followed the whip, but it’s clear that unless the Liberal Democrats were contractually obliged to follow all Tory policy, that wouldn’t happen. A Lab/Lib coalition would have the backing of ‘partner’ parties from Northern Ireland, and you can bet the SNP would back things it’s interested in and just ignore those it’s against, in order to ensure PR happens. Yes, the coalition would find it tougher to get things through, but it wouldn’t be impossible (see the SNP in Scotland, ruling as a minority, but still getting things done). And if PR happens, the coalition could call a snap election and be returned with a much more solid number of seats, even if its vote-share dropped. The pity here is that Labour’s apparently too arrogant and stupid to work with the SNP, which would ensure a larger working majority. The more things change…
9. A Lab/Lib coalition would have the backing of the majority of the electorate. 52% voted for these parties. It would therefore be the only recent government to govern with a majority backing. By contrast, the Labour party secured just 35% of the vote in 2005, and 41% in 2001. In fact, unless I’m mistaken, the last government with an electoral majority was the short-lived Lab/Lib coalition in 1974 (56%), and the last time any single party was elected with the backing of the majority of the electorate was in 1931, when the Conservatives grabbed a huge 55% on their own.
10. What’s happening now is what should be happening. We are talking about the future of our country. We shouldn’t be hoping things would be sorted over a weekend. Even in countries that have had coalitions for decades, it still takes days of negotiation after an election to figure out the way forward. With new coalitions, the process can take weeks, but that’s to ensure things will work and that they will be stable. This is important for the United Kingdom, so, please, the media and the moaners, just let our politicians get on with it. Better that they take a week to get things right than rush into an agreement and screw everything up.

The BBC reports that Odeon’s reversed its decision to boycott the upcoming Alice in Wonderland film “following talks with Disney”. If you’ve not followed this story, Odeon got narked after Disney announced it was to ignore the standard ’17 weeks to DVD’, dropping the gap by four weeks. This, argued Odeon, would screw over UK cinema chains by setting a new benchmark that would reduce their potential revenue.

Disney’s stance is that by getting the DVD out sooner, it’ll reduce bootlegging. I have two helpful hints to Disney in this regard:

1. A brilliant way to stop bootlegging is to stop screwing over the international market. If you release all of your films at the same time everywhere, rather than many of them in the US first and six months later everywhere else, people will be more likely to rush out to see them, rather than reading about them in some mag, twiddling thumbs for a few days, reading more online reviews from the US, getting impatient and then torrenting the films. Note: happily, this will also deal with the ‘disappointing international box office returns’ you keep whining about regarding Pixar films that are out on Region 1 DVD by the time they finally arrive in cinemas in the UK and elsewhere.
2. You cannot bootleg a cinema experience. It’s pretty clear that many films—including a lot of those by Disney—are as much about the environment and the big screen these days as the story. To that end, reducing the potential amount of time films stay in cinemas by at least four weeks is stupid.