“Journalist” Leena Rao over at TechCrunch has stumbled across the whole App Store refund non-issue and decided to pick up the cry and hue. Though she shows slightly better journalism chops then Kotaku - she at least acknowledges that the clause may have been there before - she still uses the same incendiary whoring-for-page-hit approach that Kotaku did: ZOMG Apple is going to bankrupt independent developers! Run for your lives.
When journalists (and I’m obviously using the term extraordinarily loosely here) cover a rare disease, they typically interview a doctor or a research scientist to find out more. When they cover any obscure topic, they find somebody who is an expert in that matter so they can get more information. Why the hell doesn’t it occur to these people to put this contract — which is a legal document — in front of somebody who’s an expert in reading and interpreting legal documents. Those people are known as “lawyers”, and it’s not exactly hard to find one who would like some publicity.
How hard would it be to do a little god damned work before telling people to go pick up their pitchforks and torches? Would it kill these people to, I dunno, say… do their fucking job? Or maybe whoring for page hits is their job and I’m just being stupidly idealistic expecting them to have some shred of professional integrity.
Let me sum this whole thing up again:
- the contract terms haven’t changed.
- Apple has not changed their refund policy.
- a “claim” in a legal sense is not the same thing as somebody saying “gimme my money back”
God I’m sick of mediocre minds doing copy-and-paste journalism, reiterating the same bogus, sensationalist misinformation without giving it the slightest scrutiny.
