REJECTED: Snowtape (for saving radio music, despite this being allowed)
Vemedio’s Snowtape is an app for listening to internet radio, recording it, and playing it back later. It’s been rejected for the record/playback part. There are two issues here: aside from the rejection, Apple appears to be admitting explicitly that there is no public, official rule against this behaviour, only a secret, internal, rule:
I tried to asked him about the paragraph in the iPhone Developer SDK agreement, we are violating. His sole words were, that there are lots of things missing in the SDK agreement and that they can not foresee any circumstance that leads to a denial of an app. That‘s right! We did not violate any paragraph of the SDK, yet they forbid us distributing our app.
It’s frustrating that Apple still refuses to “come clean” on the grounds and causes of app rejections. But hey – that’s what you’re reading this blog for! :)
Looking at the rejection, and what Apple is allowing / disallowing for Radio apps, there are two things the app does that (allegedly) gave Apple cause to reject it:
- Records radio music, allowing you to playback later at your convenience
- Allows you to share recorded music with other people
Vemedio points out that many other apps do at least item 1 – which is true. However, there are specific laws that allow for a *limited* form of this activity. If the user is merely time-shifting (listening to a broadcast say 1 hour later than it was streamed), that’s generally OK. Go read about TiVo, and the numerous legal wrangles it got into, if you’re interested in this. The few iPhone radio apps I’ve looked at had limitations on the “recording” part.
Indefinite saving of radio music is a different matter. Personally, I don’t know the legal situation on this right now – I suspect that there are provisions in copyright law that make this clearly illegal. My guess is that Vemedio were too overt in their “we’re saving this music forever!” stance, where the law allows a limited right of “caching”. Perhaps like the “right of quotation”: i.e. you cannot copy a book without owning the copyright, but you can copy short sections for specific use, e.g. to critique them.
The second action – sharing music that you recorded from a broadcast stream – is (IIRC) definitely illegal. It always has been. Maybe there’s some new law I haven’t heard of that allows this – but I doubt it. As a listener to radio music, you haven’t magically acquired copyright over that music. I don’t know what Vemedio thinks they’re doing with that feature (I haven’t tried the app), but it strikes me that Apple could easily have struck that down using existing clauses in the SDK agreement to do with “must not take possibly-illegal actions” etc.
Intriguingly, the Mac version of Snowtape doesn’t appear to do the “sharing” part (I can’t find it in the release notes nor in the marketing materials). But then again, Snowtape has a poor website, lacking in concrete info on what the app can and cannot do, so I may have misunderstood / misread this – if so, mea culpa. I do wonder, however, whether Vemedio has deliberately kept “sharing” out of the main app because of the legal issues.
