RSS Feed Hijacking

If you think content theft is bad enough, there's more bad news coming. eWeek writes about a case of podcast hijacking, where a thief has integrated someone else's podcast into his own site, the URL of which has appeared in big aggregators such as Yahoo and iTunes.

The guy, Marcus, wrote back to the thief asking him to redirect the podcast back to the owner. "Podkeyword honored his request, Marcus said, after which his listener numbers abruptly collapsed. Marcus came to find that Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service, which shields RSS information from its users, had also picked up the Podkeyword URL. Marcus contacted Apple, which has to date not fixed the URL.

Marcus then wrote back to Podkeyword to ask that his listing be temporarily reinstated on Podkeyword while he worked to fix things with Apple. Podkeyword reportedly responded that the listing would be reinstated only if Marcus provided an unspecified payment or agreed permanently to its terms."

The solution? Stick ads into your content and sit back while someone else builds your audience.

-- via Unmediated
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