A podcast is audio content that is distributed to listeners over the Internet through an RSS feed. According to press reports, Marcus discovered that downloads of his podcast had suddenly diminished after he had gradually won an audience of 1,500 regular listeners.

Marcus found that Yahoo has an RSS listing for his podcast on its podcasts.yahoo.com directory, but that the listing directs potential visitors to podkeyword.com rather than to vegan.com. He also discovered that Apple's iTunes online music store associates the podkeyword.com Web address with the Erik's Diner podcast.

Demanding Money

Marcus asked podkeyword.com to make a listing change. But the site allegedly replied that it would only do so if Marcus made a payment or permanently agreed to its terms, according to press reports.

"I can't say much about the specific case because of my client's (Marcus) attorney-client privilege rights," said Colette Vogele, head of the San Francisco, California-based law firm Vogele & Associates and a fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. "I can say that we are investigating several potential claims and options."

Vogele has posted a report on Marcus' problems with podkeyword.com on her blog at cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/vogele/.

Technology and Law

"I do think this is a classic situation of a new technology trying to fit into existing legal structures," Vogele said. "This is not uncommon for Internet-related disputes, and it's one reason why the U.S. Copyright Act was amended in 1998 to try and address some technological advances."

In her blog, Vogele said that, overnight, Marcus lost 75 percent of his audience as a result of the hijacking.

"RSS hijacking is different (from domain hijacking)," Marcus wrote in an e-mail quoted on Vogele's blog. "Most podcasters are not technically savvy, and the technique used for hijacking their feeds doesn't involve swiping passwords or overt illegal methods."

Rather, he wrote, it involves finding a target podcast and creating your own unique URL for it on a Web site you control. "You then point your URL to the RSS feed of the target podcast," he explained. "Next, you do what it takes to make sure that, as new podcast search engines come to market, the page each engine creates for your target podcast points to your URL instead of the podcast creator's official URL." (continued...)

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