Podcast hijacked

The criminal mind never sleeps does it? eWeek has a sick, sad little tale of Erik Marcus and his vegan-themed podcast "Erik's Diner" and how the RSS feed pointing to his podcast was hijacked by some moronic cybersquatters. First, Erik noticed his podcast feed was showing up at Yahoo's podcasts page. Unfortunately, it wasn't his feed. It seems the criminal crook dipsticks from Podkeyword.com had instead appropriated the feed and redirected to something else. After asking Podkeyword to quit doing this, they did. Unfortunately, Yahoo never changed the URL. Apple has picked it up as well in iTMS, but has also failed to fix the error. Podkeyword refuses to pick it back up temporarily until Yahoo and Apple can get their $#!+ act together. In fact, Podkeyword has demanded payment in order to fix a problem they started. That, children, is what we call extortion, and is generally frowned upon in most societies. According to Erik this fiasco has cost him nearly 1000 listeners per show...

Now, this of course points out the same vulnerability in RSS that you can have with site URL's. But it also exposes a critical flaw in using RSS commercially, which has nothing to do with the protocol itself. Instead, what we have here are two behemoths (Yahoo and Apple) seemingly ignorant or uncaring about fixing a problem. This is the sort of thing that can kill a technology solution. Think it's going to get better with RSS all up in Vista? Oh yeah, that will be fun to watch. Apparently there is no proper case law for a quick legal remedy (as in, put those criminals at Podkeyword under the jail). In the meanwhile, let's all give Apple and Yahoo a little pressure to fix this and let Erik get on with his good work. You'd think with Steve-o being vegan and all... Here's the link to Erik's Diner's RSS feed, and the MP3 link. See, was that so hard?
 
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