Steve Jobs’s anti-porn and anti-Flash vendettas for the app store have been much in the news lately, and we’ve covered them here a time or two. One of the articles I came across last night brings them up again, in the form of an email exchange between a Gawker reporter and the normally-laconic Steve Jobs. (Gawker is the parent company of Gizmodo, which is much in the news lately concerning the hullaballoo over the “stolen” prototype iPhone.)

Reporter Ryan Tate was so upset by the new iPad commercial’s rhetoric, calling the iPad a “revolution,” that, upon seeing it, he fired off an e-mail to Steve Jobs asking, “If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? […] Revolutions are about freedom.”

Jobs responded that the iPad indeed offered “freedom":

Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

It continues from there in the vein of those late-night email exchanges we’ve all taken part in, where fatigue makes the participants say perhaps a few more things than they intended.

It ends with Tate complaining about “Apple’s pet police force literally kicking in my co-workers’ doors” and Jobs responding, “You are so misinformed. No one kicked in any doors. You’re believing a lot of erroneous blogger reports.”

As a parting shot, Jobs adds, “By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others (sic) work and belittle their motivations?”

Chris Matyszczyk at CNet has some snarky commentary on the e-mail exchange. “For one moment I thought I was present at one of those Obama-Clinton debates. I half expected Tate to tell Jobs he was ‘likable enough.’”

Both the anti-Flash and anti-porn issues are important to iPad and iPhone readers, of course. As Tate brings up in his e-mails, the Flash prohibition affects the ability of magazine publishers such as Wired to produce content for Apple devices at the same time as they produce it for other platforms.

If iPad-executable code from Adobe’s Flash integrated development environment (IDE) had been allowed into the app store, Wired could produce an iPad version of its magazine at the same time as the versions for every other platform. But since Apple insists on native code only, Wired has to go to the added trouble and expense of producing a separate iPad version.

If every platform started insisting on native code only, the trouble and expense of e-publishing the magazine could increase substantially.

As for the pornography issue, leaving aside app store purges and “Iran editions” of magazines, there is a question of who gets to decide what is or isn’t “porn”. A “no nipples” restriction is one thing, but not all porn has pictures. On the professional side, romance and erotica novels have long been a major driver of early e-book adoption. Internet porn writers have been creating textual stories for at least two decades.

A cogent standard for deciding what is obscene and what is not has been notoriously hard to pin down. Even the Supreme Court has wrestled with it, with Justice Potter Stewart famously declaring that he could not define it, but he knew it when he saw it. And we’re supposed to expect that the app store gatekeepers who have as yet been unable even to come up with a coherent set of guidelines for normal app approval will do a better job?

Will romance and erotica books be locked out of the iBooks store? Who decides whether a given book is too steamy? (Now I’m envisioning a group of app store employees whose job is to read every submitted romance novel to check the descriptiveness of the sex scenes!) Of course, even if they are, the iPad supports multiple e-book readers, so e-rotica fans can get their fix from Amazon or other e-book stores—not to mention the ready availability of as much porn as you want via Mobile Safari.

In related news, for those who have been following the Apple/Gizmodo follies, the judge in the case recently unsealed the search warrant used to seize evidence from Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s house, and Declan McCullagh from CNet and Sam Diaz from ZDNet have excellent analyses of what it contained. While it has no direct bearing on e-books, it is nonetheless an interesting source of schadenfreude.

3 COMMENTS

  1. A: Porn. Porn is available from many websites, which can be accessed via the Safari browser that’s built-in to the i-product (-Phone, -Pad, -Pod Touch.) Porn is available and you don’t need an app. End of discussion.

    B: Flash. I think we’re begging the question of _why_ Wired et al _need_ to do the things that Flash can do, and that they’d have to spend day after day re-writing as an App. Whatever happened to just text-and-graphics HTML?

    C: PC mode. I find myself agreeing with Jobs: The desktop-PC(*) community has created this clique-ish idea of what levels of risk and complexity are acceptable for a PC operating paradigm. Jobs, with the i-products, is setting forth a different paradigm: one where you maybe can’t do as much, but what you want to do is much easier. It’s always been true, but never more so than with the i-products, that “with Apple, it’s really easy to do exactly what they’ll let you do in exactly the way they’ll let you do it, and anything else is impossible.”

    (*) and this is “PC” as in “personal computer”, including Macs and Linux and such, as opposed to i-products.

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