Excellent.

I agree that Apple should have handled this differently. At the same time, I think we should honour this guy's attitude. It's refreshing and if we all behaved that way - major corporations included - the world would be a better place.

This story reminds me a little bit of the guy who made Flappy Bird, earned millions in ad revenue, then shut it down at its peak because he didn't want people to be addicted to it. Almost impossible for most of us to fathom, given that most of us are motivated by money. But it's nice to see that some people act according to different motivations.

The whole point is that Apple never asked for this guy's opinion. That he's OK with what Apple's doing is a happy coincidence, and the next guy whose work they're going to use may have a different opinion.

Kudos to the author for that. Unfortunately, he has extended his well-meaning olive branch to companies built on the philosophy of Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists.

Serious question: do you believe that letter to be immoral or indicative of immoral behavior? Or something specific?

Edit: format; quote.

What's happening with Jguitar however is that a big tech player that exists because people pay for their software (iOS) setting a precedent where they're actively siphoning content outside the garden and feeding it back to users in their ecosystem, with no attribution or licensing deal with the creator. That's wrong, in the exact same way that homebrew Hackintosh machines built for sale are wrong.

If you're breaching courtesy and decency it doesn't help your case that the victim is a nice person.

Sure but Apple doesn't essentially have to send him the bill for it, bandwidth isn't cheap and it can grow pretty quickly with that much devices.

This site was in the examples for guitar chords, that’s about it. Maybe they should have asked him, but there’s zero obligation to do so. If you have a blog someone links to it, you don’t mind, do you?

The point of contention here is that the template linked straight into the chord image generator - which isn’t kosher. If I build a chart generator for my site, I wouldn’t want anyone linking straight into it - Apple isn’t using it on their site and claiming it’s theirs, but they’re pointing out to all their customers that they could just hit my generator directly for visualising charts. That’s weird. Not illegal, but weird.

I would also want to make sure Apple doesn't accidentally DDoS my service - I mean, if this gets broader use and if the service does not scale well this could be an issue. Or if it scales too well via AWS (doesn't seem the case here), there could be a huge surprise bill coming in.

If I'd use some non-public Apple API without asking them for written permission (or strip content from their site) I bet all hell would break loose.

The OP put something on the internet with the intention for others to use it. Apple used it. Is there anything on his site (terms,"rules") that indicate what Apple is doing is considered non-acceptable use?

Shouldn't we be happy the world can still work like this - bottom-up implementation with presumably good intentions - instead of having to talk to lawyers before every tiny step we take? We're taking about looking up a guitar chord for crying out loud.

Of course better attribution is desirable. Why not let this be Step 2.

I admit a bad turnout could be an unexpectedly high bill for the OP. And I would assume Apple to turn a deaf ear if he'd requested them to help pay that bill. But aren't those the consequences of putting up a public API?

@asaph If you want: please follow up on this and let HN know how this plays out. What course of action you took, how Apple responded (if at all)

Congrats... I guess

[Edit: typo]

If you don't have any terms of service or any kind of licensing info on your website the default is: it belongs to you and you choose to exclusively publish your work on that website. Just because there's no license info doesn't mean it's public domain. You have the right to cite the content properly (meaning attribution) as part of anther work under fair use.

The problem here is the technicality of what it actually means to publish on a website.

Interesting, thanks. (I presume there is jurisprudence to substantiate this statement)

If true, it opens up a way to question fair-use: Suppose Apple now properly cites JGuitar.com as the source, and otherwise continues its implementation unchanged, would that be fair-use? Hmmm.

If I write a custom browser that only loads images from web pages then I'm abusing the internet?

That statement would be true for any webkit based paid browser.

That is exactly what I meant, but better phrased - thanks.

Yes apple could have done this better and they should -- but why not just have a chat with apple before you go nuclear?

Well they are placing an increased load onto the side and get nice resources for free, not even doing the cheapest form of flattery: attribution. That's happening a million times on the internet each day, where pictures and other copyrighted materials are redistributed without consent or attribution, and it's ridiculous that the currently most valuable company on earth feels the need to be a cheapskate about that, too.

People lost their mind when Google did something like that in their image search, and unlike Apple, they provided attribution and a prime backlink. If Apple likes the service so much, they could just have bought it entirely and it wouldn't even show up in their balance, so proper attribution, and maybe ask the provider if he/she can handle the additional load, or even provide some support to handle the load, would just have been fair, don't you think?

However it is debatable since Apple is 'only' providing a template/example which the user must actively turn into a 'shortcut' to have this functionality. Or at least that's how I understand this feature works.

Then again, I think Apple surely could do a better job in attribution toward the sources. Maybe a standard for website owners to provide meta info with a fallback to the website URL.

According to the linked site, this is a premade shortcut that Apple supplied, not something the user needs to create. Just click install and it works, was how I read it.

Because that's exactly what Apple would do if you used their stuff without permission?

How would you even do that?

A lawyer is a disinterested third party, who ought to know how to initiate negotiations without any emotional attachment.

I know for myself I’d at least want to have a legal expert review anything I indended on sending, as otherwise I may inadvertently shoot myself in the foot.

If it was my site, I would have just replaced each image with goatse, if the user agent string was "Shortcuts/700 CFNetwork/974.2.1 Darwin/18.0.0"

Asserting your rights while finding a way forward that benefits both you and Apple is going to play out much better in the long run. Apple is almost certainly just negligent in this case (it's a data stream in an app they bought), not maliciously stealing content.

That's because you're a nice person. I'd return images that were wrong and let Apple Support deal with users thinking their new feature was broken.

It would be cool if Apple had reached out to him, but as other commenters have mentioned this integration has existed for a long time in the Workflow app, so it's not even new.