Podcaster Erik Marcus seeks legal redress when a cyber-squatter substitutes itself for his RSS feed, losing him listeners. (eWEEK.com)In an assault reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, Podcaster Erik Marcus recently found that his RSS feed had been inexplicably redirected.
According to Marcus, rather than fully cooperate to address the situation, the cyber-squatter is demanding payment or permanent agreement to terms, and Marcus is seeking legal redress for this new form of Internet extortion.
Marcus publishes Vegan.com and the "Erik's Diner" Podcasts.
Over the course of the past year, Marcus has built his listenership from 100 people per show up to some 1,500. Over the past few weeks, he noticed that Yahoo Inc. had created an entry for his show on its beta site, Podcasts.yahoo.com.
The page had an RSS feed belonging not to Vegan.com, however, but to a site named Podkeyword.com.
Marcus shared with Ziff Davis Internet News a letter he sent to a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property and who has agreed to work with him on his case.
Click here to read about how Yahoo's Podcast search works.
In the letter, Marcus said he contacted Yahoo repeatedly for about a month. The company never responded. Yahoo had failed to correct the RSS listing and had also failed to return phone calls seeking comment for this story by the time it was posted.
Marcus e-mailed Podkeyword directly in order to "nip this problem in the bud rather than let it grow," he said in his letter to his lawyer, Colette Vogele.
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.
"This has cost me more than 1,000 listeners per show," Marcus wrote in the letter.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Podcast Hijacked, Held for Ransom
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