Sadly, I must inform you that my attempts at resolving the pending Legal issues with CBS have been unsuccessful and I’ve taken down Daxhotel from the App Store. The e-mail I got made it quite clear that it’s not possible to change Daxhotel in any way short of a complete rewrite to make it acceptable to CBS:

Raphael:
First, please accept my apologies for the delay in responding to you.
We have checked our files and have been unable to locate any record of receiving the email you addressed to "termsofuse@startrek.com" on September 24, 2005.  We also do not have any record of responding and advising that we have no objections to your proposed use of the STAR TREK properties on your website, which predated the "Daxhotel" iTunes application and can now be seen at www.sabberworm.com/daxhotel. Any proposed conclusion that no response constitutes our implied consent for you to use this content in this manner is not accepted.  We further note that the terms of use from www.startrek.com in 2005 may have permitted your personal use of some protected content, but in no way did any permissible use include publication, distribution and/or commercial use of any of the content.
Nevertheless, we have again reviewed your "Daxhotel" itunes application and underlying website and continue to object to your use of the STAR TREK properties in this manner.  You are utilizing the STAR TREK properties in a manner which is inconsistent with our exclusive rights under the law:  You use the "double parabola" logo; You use the stylized trademarks for each of the series' titles; You use copyrighted images on your website; Most importantly, you specifically state that your application is a "comprehensive STAR TREK episode guide," which you are downloading from www.startrek.com.  Your use constitutes trademark and copyright infringement. This is not fair use.
We appreciate that you provide notice on your website advising of Paramount Pictures and CBS's rights and suggest users of your services accept our website's terms of use; however, this does not eliminate our concerns.  Nor will your offering the application for free and removing the logos and STAR TREK name from your website and application eliminate our concerns with the clear copyright violation.
While we appreciate your enthusiasm for the STAR TREK properties, we cannot permit this use.  We request that you take immediate steps to remove the "Daxhotel" application from the App Store and refrain from offering this content in any format in the future.  Please confirm your compliance by no later than Monday October 19, 2009.  Otherwise, we will contact Apple directly seeking removal of the application.
Thank you for your correspondence and explanation.  We trust that you will comply with our request.

Mallory Levitt
Vice President & Assistant General Counsel
Intellectual Property
CBS Law
51 West 52nd Street
New York, NY 10019

From this response it seems clear that the technical aspect of Daxhotel which is that it does exactly the same as a normal web browser would do which could also download web pages for later (cached/offline) use is overthrown by some sort of semantical aspect which seems to imply that I or Daxhotel are in any way offering/selling/distributing “content”, which from my point of view isn’t the case at all. I am not offering any content, I am not even hosting it, I’m just providing a tool to access content that is already viewable on the web by anyone. No content is being distributed with the app.

Even though I’m saddened to see Daxhotel come to an end, I actually was surprised to feel a great bit of relief as I clicked that “Remove from sale” button: finally I wouldn’t have to worry about the future of my app anymore, about rejected updates and possible legal battles. I was free again. Free also to create something new. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment…

Additionally, I will be releasing the Daxhotel source code in the “Daxhotel” section of this site.

Sincerely,
Raphael Schweikert

I’ve recently had to answer some emails asking (and rightly so) why Daxhotel, a currently unusable app is still being sold and I’ve had to come up with good answers all of which legitimate but none of them really convincing in itself. They were in essence:

• It’s not Daxhotel that’s broken, it’s startek.com. And because startrek.com is out of my hands, I don’t know how long the outage will last. As a matter of fact, in the beginning I was sure it would be a couple of weeks at most which is why I didn’t take it down immediately.
• Also, if I had taken down the app and startrek.com was up again the next day, I didn’t know if my app would ever get approved again.
• Upgrade path. This comes in two parts. Firstly, the app works fine for people who already have it and I didn’t want to kill the upgrade for people who might not have had a chance to get the latest version. Secondly: no-one could really assure me that the upgrade path would be kept intact if the app was removed from sale and later re-added. The last thing I wanted, however, was for current users – especially not the kind for whom it has never worked – to be paying again for an update.
• Lastly: I’ve responded to all E-Mails concerning the issue and offered a refund or an Ad-Hoc version (of which everyone chose the latter) and got only kind replies which I thought so nice that they would warrant to keep ripping users off for a while…

To avoid these kinds of defences, I have decided to stop ripping people off and instead only rip those off that already purchased: I am making Daxhotel free for the time being (meaning as long as it’s not working).

Those who know how the app store work also know what this means: all the updates which are to (hopefully) come afterwards will also be free to the people who got it while it was free. So here’s your chance to get even and rip me off for a change…

Regarding the updates: I do intend to get the fixed version out – someday, it’s obviously taking longer than I thought it would. The fixed version is currently rejected (while the old version is still being sold even though nothing has changed except the added search and – obviously – the fix; but nothing that’s even remotely related to CBS’ IP…) and I’m currently in contact with a lawyer from CBS. Keep your fingers crossed.

I have received a number of complaints recently about Daxhotel crashing during the initial data download process. I will be investigating the issue but even if I have a bug fix ready, it may take a long time to get the app ready for approval since the last update which I submitted to Apple for approval two months ago is still being reviewed.

I will take the app off sale if I can confirm the crashes and re-submit a fixed version ASAP. Let's hope for the best.

Please comment if you have any insights.

Update:

Initial analysis shows that the episode lists on startrek.com are broken, all season links only display the first season (technically speaking, this means that the season parameter is ignored, the list always displays the first season instead of the requested, e.g. second season). I have put up a warning in the app's description. It is not yet clear if this is the reason for the crashes but it's quite likely.

Update 2:

I've identified a second problem: the episode Encounter at Farpoint, Part I has gone offline and yields in a 404 not found error page. I've updated Daxhotel to fix both problems by means of The Web Archive and submitted the updated version to Apple for review. Let's hope they do. And quickly!