Feedjacking Rears Its Ugly Head
Saturday, December 3, 2005 at 09:18AM Fellow blogger Martin McKeay (this links to his blog) recently commented on "feedjacking" of podcasts and RSS feeds. He recently started podcasting and has been researching where links originate. He and others (just do a Google search for "feedjacking" to find out who) are noting that it is possible to "feedjack" links to podcasts and RSS streams.
As Martin points out, such redirecting of links can be good -- or it can be evidence that somebody is attempting to claim some "ownership" or credit for the source.
Ah, so we see that "intellectual proprty ownership" issues can arise all over. Well, maybe not "ownership" per se. The thing about linking is that, once you put something on the web, you hope -- and expect -- for people to link to it. The fact that someone else can generate revenue based on traffic related to your linked item is a separate issue. So is the fact that someone can claim authorship rights.
In jest I suggested to Martin that maybe this is a problem that First 4 Internet can help solve. Ha ha. (That was my second attempt at DRM related humor. Here was my first.)
Reader Comments (1)
You might want to go back and read the follow up I did on this post: http://www.mckeay.net/secure/archives/000678.html Turns out there was another side to the story, and as you listen to the podcast, you'll find that the 'hijacker' really was only doing exactly what his page was supposed to do. The problem was that Vegan.com had somehow pointed most of their listeners to the Podkey RSS feed rather than their own, and when they wanted to cancel the Podkey feed, well, they cancelled a lot of their own readers as well. And the 'extortion' was actually just the owner of Podkey wanting to get paid for the time needed to make modifications the owner of Vegan.com wanted.
There's always two sides to the story. Easy to forget that sometimes.