Apple App Store Bans Pulitzer-Winning Satirist for Satire

By Ryan Singel April 15, 2010 | 7:07 pm | Categories: Media
Editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore may be good enough to win this year’s Pulitzer Prize, but he’s evidently too biting to get past the auditors who run Apple’s iPhone app store, who ruled that lampooning public figures violated its terms of service.

Fiore irked Apple’s censorious staffers with his cartoons making fun of the Balloon Boy hoax and the pair that famously crashed a White House party, according to Laura McGann at the Neiman Journalism Lab.

Fiore won a Pulitzer Monday for animations he made for the SFGate, the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle. But Fiore, who is a freelancer who runs a syndication business, was rejected by Apple in December for an app called NewToons that features his work.

According to a Dec. 21 e-mail reprinted by Neiman, Apple rejected his app because it “contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.14 from the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement which states: Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

Neither Fiore nor Apple responded to requests for comment.



Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/apple-bans-satire/

So...sex position apps are fine, but Fiore is too much?!?

That is a ridiculous assertion.

Count me as among those who think Apple is wrong on this one. Still, calling them "Nazi-like" is as over-the-top in one direction as Apple's is in the other.

Here's how it goes: Apple's lawyers wrote up some standards to help keep them from being sued. The language is at once legalize and intentionally vague. Some Apple employee gets "WEBSITE X" on his to-do list for Thursday, one of thirty other apps on his list which were submitted for approval on that day. He/she checks it out. He/she makes a determination based completely upon Apple's rules, and more than likely has never even heard of Fiore.

Point is, give this a chance to work itself out. A friend of mine who is a Mad Magazine cartoonist submitted an animated Congressional Bobble-head doll app, and was turned down under the same rule. But a concerted lobbying effort, in part from here on DU (because I posted about it), eventually led Apple to review the app and eventually approve it. Fiore's app will likely be approved once a few thousand people write and bitch and point to Fiore's resume. It's the way the system works. Stop whining and comparing the most trivial things to Nazi tactics.

Don't understand what goes through the mind of people who make decisions like this.

I'm a 20+ year Mac user and I own some Apple stock, but sometimes the actions of the corporation totally baffle me.

Apple has deep, deep pockets.

they can't think.

Sexist little pukes.

Waiter! Another helping of sour grapes, please.

I told ya so...(read my post #6 above -- as others were comparing Apple to the Nazis)...

----

A Pulitzer Winner Gets Apple’s Reconsideration


On Monday Mark Fiore became the first online-only cartoonist to win a Pulitzer, for weekly animated videos published on SFGate.com, the Web site of The San Francisco Chronicle. In a subsequent interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab, he recalled that Apple had rejected his iPhone application in December since it included cartoons that mocked public figures.

Political cartoons, it turns out, can violate Apple’s license agreement with developers, which states that applications, or “apps,” can be rejected if the content “may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic or defamatory.”

Apple alone determines what is objectionable for its online app store, a practice that has come under close scrutiny. In its message to Mr. Fiore in December, the company cited his cartoon’s allusions to torture and to last year’s White House party crashers as examples.

After Mr. Fiore received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning — and after he mentioned his app’s rejection in an article published on niemanlab.org on Thursday — he was encouraged by Apple to resubmit it. Mr. Fiore did so on Friday morning and is awaiting a response.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/books/17cartoonist.html?th&emc=th

satire is political speech, and thus, not defamatory, and thus they don't understand their own fucking rules.