Podnews Weekly Review

1 of 171 episodes indexed
Back to Search - All Episodes

Podcast piracy or defamation, should podcast hosts monitor the content or could a new podcast license be the simple fix to the problem?

by James Cridland and Sam Sethi
May 28th 2021
01:18:37
Description
Welcome to Podland. We're sponsored by Buzzsprout.
The easiest way to host, promote and track your podcast, their advance plan and your 1st 90 days are free.
It's May the 27th 2021. I'm James Cridland, the editor of podnews here in Australia.
And officially a Australian citizen James
And officially an Australian citizen as well, which is all very exciting. Yes, yes. That was a very exciting day that I had on monday. And who are you? I'm Sam Sethi, the editor of sound talks technology here in the UK and finally we've got some sun after the wettest April ever. So all I can say is start the hose pipe band and the moaning brits that it's too hot.
I Will Page author of "Tarzan Economics: Eight principles and pivoting through disruption" and I'll be on the show later on to talk about podcast piracy. He will indeed, along with Dave Jones, the developer of podcast index. Portland's a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's podcast news.

Now, the big story of the week that I wanted to cover it's podcast piracy and licensing. James, You wrote about a wonderful podcast called Finding Natasha, which is from Message Heard and you wrote that they had their podcast well stolen or copied and syndicated. What's it all about James?
So this was happening quite a lot last year, Anchor was being used to essentially copy people's podcasts and then the pirate would add on their support this podcast and have a button to give the podcast some money because it was such a good podcast, except all they've done is they've stolen the audio in the first place. And that was happening a lot last year. And it seemed to have cut down on that. They seem to be running some kind of automated bot that is at least checking the audio. It's not the same as audio, which is already in the Spotify system, which kind of makes sense.
The weird thing about Finding Natasha, is that what they've done is that the pirate has put the audio up on anchor, but they haven't used the audio artwork, nor have they used the audio in its entirety because any mention of Message Heard, which is the company that made it, they've edited out, which is a bit weird.

I thought we would reach out and actually talk to Jake Warren, who's the CEO of Message Heard and ask him what it's all about.
Jake. Hello, how are you?
Hey Sam, I'm good. Thank you so much for having me on again.
Welcome back now, congratulations on the successful launch. What is Finding Natasha all about?
It's an interesting one because it's something which is incredibly personal to me because it's actually all about my mom, which is I guess a bit bizarre and doesn't follow the usual pattern of the kind of shows that we make a Message Heard. But to be honest with you, it was never actually intended to be a podcast and it's almost a bit by luck, chance and I guess the sort of foresight of my colleagues that it actually ended up being one because I guess to give you the kind of background of the story without ruining the story. So if anyone's listening hasn't heard it, they can go and listen to it without me divulging too much information. But essentially, my mom was in the early 1970s when she was a teenager. She was I guess anointed as having the talent to potentially be one of the world's best ballet dancers.

Now, obviously this is a period of time where relations between the East and the West soviet bloc Soviet union and wasn't particularly good and as was the case then, which is very much still the case now, which is, if you want to be the greatest dancer in the world, that is the crown jewel of ballet. It's part and parcel association with Russia. It's the great ballet companies the Bolshoi and Mariinsky are still probably fated as the two best in the world.
And my mom had the opportunity to be the first Western ballet dancer To be deemed good enough to get a scholarship to go and dance in the Soviet Union as a 17 year old in 1974. To cut a very long story short, I think she was probably naive to be polite as to the kind of the circumstances of what that would mean going. Unfortunately for her. She went at a time as well after a few prominent defections that happened to the west, mainly Mikhail.
And effectively she was shunned not wanted feared as a westerner and left to her own devices. She ended up getting very sick for drinking dirty water and contracting hepatitis and was also suffering from malnutrition.

She was effectively left to die in an isolation ward and that probably would have been where she had died if it wasn't. For the intervention of one Russian teenager, a girl called Natasha who was the only person that showed her any kindness That actually broke into the facility, managed to get her out and alert the British authorities and effectively get her home. Now, the last time my mom saw Natasha or the last time she had any interaction with her was on a runway almost 50 years ago in 1974. And my mom has been searching for her ever since in fits and bursts but had also repressed this for a very long time.
So I actually only found out about this story in its extent a couple of years ago, maybe two years ago because it was all a bit too painful. I think my mom had blocked it out. She eventually did reveal the story to me and it was hovering in the back of my mind. I need to try and find this woman or at least find what at what happened to her for the sake of my mom and I had always intended to obviously running a business can be pretty time consuming.

But when lockdown one happened, I went back to stay with my mom for a few months. She lives on her own and sort of through the worst of it. And we were talking about it a lot and that was where I made the decision that actually there was a lot of uncertainty with everything in the world now that felt like the right opportunity in the right time to try and find this woman and I won't ruin what happens. But the podcast effectively documents that experience of trying to find the woman that saved my mom half the world away half a century ago. I never intended for it to be a podcast.
But talking to my colleagues as I did on a daily basis, I think it was probably Sandra Ferrari, my head of production said, well this is a pretty good story, We should start recording this just in case and thank goodness we did make that decision because the response to the show has been overwhelming. And we're lucky enough to make some really great shows that I've had some fantastic responses, but doing something which felt a bit of a personal pet project has really snowballed into something which the emails and the messages of people saying how lovely they thought it was. Just the kind response to it. Not so much even for me or message her, but actually from my mom I think is it restores your faith a little bit in the world.

I can see this being a film. It's got a film written all over it.
Really, we're very lucky because obviously we are signed by Curtis Brown, one of those great literally talent agents. And this is actually presented a really interesting opportunity where we've had expressed interest in books and tv and drama adaptations and all that good stuff which was beyond my wildest dreams when I started this. So it's really exciting. It feels something mammoth could come out of this, which was never my intention, but it's a lovely bonus. We're not going to say no.
Your mother will be very proud of you. The one challenge that's come about, I understand is that somebody's taken your lovely podcast and loaded it up onto Anchor, change the cover artwork and plagiarized it in effect a bit of podcast piracy and are pushing it out to the end points of Apple, Spotify, Google, etcetera and pushing off as their own. How did you get alerted to that first of all? And what's the consequence has been of it?

So it was actually worse than that because that idea of ripping audio and re-uploading it is, it's not particularly new or novel. That has happened all the time. Usually with, probably the biggest shows you don't think about. The Joe Rogan's of this world. Having his show is put onto Youtube myself.
But actually, they had manipulated the audio itself to actually edit and remove any mention of Message Heard, the company that made the show, which was particularly bizarre because obviously it's my voice in the show and Message Heard is the business I run. But it was one step further because it wasn't just plagiarized. It was actually manipulation of it.
I guess, the way that we found it was really just through good luck, because with my team and I think it was my colleague Emily, who leads on more of the sort of marketing and PR side of things with us typing it into the usual places that you would imagine. And suddenly there was another show called Finding Natasha which had the exactly same description and slightly different artwork. And we're thinking, hang on a minute here, that's ours.
And someone has gone to these extreme lengths to try and make it theirs. But that's part of the issue when it comes to music in particular.

There is all this clever software which is able to detect when copyright is being infringed. Now it may exist for podcasting. I certainly don't know about it if it does. So really, it's a manual job, isn't it? To scour the internet to use that phrase wherever you get yours to look at all these places to see if is anyone actually trying to steal or repurpose something which we own.
So what's the downside? Are you charging a subscription for Finding Natasha or is it free on various sites? So that's my first question. Are you charging for it?
With this particular show Finding Natasha, We're not. I think part of the reason is that we don't put everything that we do behind a paywall. In fact, we've not done anything behind the payroll to date. Of course we do monetize some programming. I think this goes back to the fact that, like I said, the reality is that although this has been received as a very successful podcast, it didn't intend to be and exploiting my mom's trauma for content is an accusation you could make for doing this. I don't think she feels that way and I think she's very happy with it, but it felt a little on the nose to really start monetizing this.

This was more of something that was just the proud editorial piece, that we're very happy to make at Message Heard and we wanted as many people to enjoy it for free as possible. It's not something that was curtailing our ability to make money, but in theory, there was nothing to stop that person that uploaded it to Anchor, then in turn monetizing it themselves.
It will of course affect your traffic because they're taking some of your traffic away.
Now this week, Apple announced and has made available iOS 14.6 with subscriptions and so you can start to see more and more people putting subscriptions to this. I could imagine actually in a couple of weeks time, had you brought out Finding Natasha, you might have said, okay, we're going to charge 1 99 a subscription. And I can see more piracy therefore occurring as people go, Look, we just ripped that off, put it there, throw it in with the subscription of anyone buys it will take some money.
The problem, I spoke to Will Page, who wrote a book called Tarzan Economics. He's the ex Spotify chief economist about Finding Natasha about this very problem. And he was saying that under safe harbor rules a bit like Youtube that Spotify and Anchor can wash their hands off the piracy issue.

But he did point out that soon as it becomes a payment. So if there was a subscription payment to it, then they're taking a percentage of that payment and suddenly they are complicit with theft in effect.
What is Anchor and Spotify said to you, if anything, will they take down this other podcast or are they just going not our problem?
I'm glad to say that it has been taken down now after we got in touch, but only to the extent of whilst they, in their words, received the complaint on infringing intellectual property rights and it's under investigation, they haven't determined that, okay, this shouldn't have ever happened. But what they seem to do is that whilst you lodge a complaint, they will take it down to investigate what's going on.
So you'd hope that common sense would prevail and they wouldn't allow it back up any time soon. We haven't got that confirmation yet, but at least they did act fairly quickly to take it down whilst they looked into it.
It's an interesting one because you've got the person that's put it up apparently is a wrestler. So I don't know what to make of that.

Maybe it's a podcast, isn't it? Finding the person that tried to steal Finding Natasha. So look, they've acted quickly. Obviously it's not affecting us from a monetization perspective, but you're right. That kind of, I think the term used was safe harboring.
That goes out the window when there's money involved and right.
I think again, one of the questions is who's at fault here should Anchor Buzzsprout, Libsyn any of the podcast host be policing podcasting in the first place to check, this is who it is and this is who they say they are.
Secondly, is Apple and Spotify, Google the endpoint distribution points liable to anything. This won't ever come to a full light where anyone cares until a legal challenges brought in place.. I guess the law comes in. Do you think there's anything podcasters can do themselves in between that? Rather than going to court for a final decisions made?
It's really tricky isn't it? Because as the sort of content creator as the podcast, it's really hard to scour all of the possible destinations as to where your content could sit to make sure that no one is stealing your content and actually should that burden of responsibility be on you?

I think probably not, to be honest. I also have some sympathy with the endpoint of the Google podcasts, The Spotify and the Apples of this world because actually if you're uploading it into your hosting provider and then through their back end, disseminating it everywhere, where you would imagine it feels to me there should be some more stringent verification process as to actually what you are uploading is yours at the moment.
It just seems to say click a box, I promise I'm not lying. I actually do own this, but actually are beyond that, What are they actually doing to police and make sure that you are not committing fraud and you're not stealing other people's content.
So to me, I think the logical places where they should sit is with the hosting providers. If they're willing to accept your content and potentially take a cut of any revenue that that content generates and you're paying them fees for their services, they should be making sure that people are not stealing your content.
I tend to agree with you. I think it goes broader than just stealing your content. I spoke to James many months ago, there's a big thing about Facebook and Twitter having to watch what's being said.

President Trump was famously taken down and in certain posts, if you put the word Nazi or you put the word whatever into your tweet or your Facebook post, the moderators on those using AI will flag it and take it out. There's also a way as me, as a reader of those can flag it and actually we now know how to auto transcribe pretty quickly within a certain accuracy a podcast. We do it all the time and AI does exist which could go through and look for certain keywords.
And so I think, putting aside just the plagiarism or piracy. There was also, I think a role for hosts to actually moderate the content.
We don't want massive greed (?) in America putting out podcast realizing that actually if I put it on Twitter and Facebook, I can't say what I want to say, but I can put it in a podcast, No one can actually stop me because no one's policing it and I can get my message out equally as far as I want to because it's not moderated.
You hear these stories about white supremacist content being hosted on Apple or Spotify or whatever and it's not a case of them accepting it with open arms.

I believe it's just exactly as you said, there is no moderation in place. And so it's someone stumbles across it and says to them, hey, do you realize you're hosting this? And then retrospectively they're going, oh actually we don't want to be hosting this. Whereas actually it feels like there should be subjective barriers in place now.
I'm not saying that it should be disruptive. Let's not have 1000 hoops to jump through
Now, Dave Jones from the podcast Index who's on the show later as well today has just launched a new license tag a bit like the creative commons that we had on flicker in the old days where you can put an attribution.
Do you think that would be a good start for podcast where you could save with Finding Natasha, nope, this is totally mine. No one's allowed to copy and no ones allowed to use it or you could have on another podcast of yours, you're allowed to take a little clip out of it because this week Jason Calacanis is talking about how as service called pod clips started to take bits of his podcasts and then monetize against it, but not give him attribution or the third element of maybe this license could be, you know what crack on take all my content do what you like with it.

I don't care. Do you think that might be a good first step?
I think so. I think like anything, it would be the scale in which it could be rolled out and the awareness that it could bring in. So that actually, if it's something that 5% of the industry use, okay, it's not going to be that useful
If it's something where there can be uh, sort of uniform understanding that this is the service that we use and it's a sort of traffic- like approach as you said that either read, you can't use any, but here's a few bits or green crack on fantastic because then everyone understands the level playing field for everyone and it's clearly signposted what you can and can't do. I think just anecdotally from my own experience and the example that you give their I have noticed more significant rise in people approaching me with opportunities. So they say for social podcasting and clicks and stuff and actually like you mentioned beyond the attribution, which seems to be pretty primitive and gets lost. I don't really see the benefits of that to be honest.
So I think if there can be a uniform system, if it's this podcasting index, as you mentioned that everyone knows and understands that is fantastic and it's just make everyone's life easier.

And I think that we touched on it briefly. Once money starts to get involved, this is going to become a much bigger issue. I think people are going to start to hang on to me. I just lost several £1000 to that person copying my content and monetizing it. How do I get that back? Apple Google?
And I think yours is a prime example of just the tip of the iceberg that's about to occur. I think, I think you're probably right. I think that whenever money is involved, things start getting messier right, thankfully. That wasn't our effect.
But if this small issue that seems to thankfully have been resolved now can help people realize that actually this is going to be coming as monetization becomes an even bigger parcel and broadcasting subscriptions and stuff, then we need to get the proper processes, checks and balances in place, which is a fraud and piracy
It should not be easy and it shouldn't be condoned.
I agree. Jake! Where can people go and get Finding Natasha
To use the overly used phrase wherever you get yours for. You can listen to Finding Natasha. Jake. Warren CEO of Message Heard.

Thank you so much speeches, Jake.
Thank you so much for having me have a lovely day.
Jake Warren from Message Heard. That's a really interesting thing of just seeing a little bit more piracy in this space. So one of the things that I wanted to ask you about James before we go on is who do you think was at fault? Do you think it was Anchor? Do you think it's Spotify or do you think it's Apple Buzzsprout Libsyn?
Allowing this to happen, Is there a fault or is it just a simple case of no one has a system to stop it and therefore somebody just pushing the boundaries by saying, okay, I'm just going to keep taking stuff until somebody says, I can't.
Arguably, I think that the problem that we have here, the thing that is at fault is the podcast industry, because we have said that podcasts are open, there's no DRM, there's no license that you need to sign in order to have a podcast in your own app.
The RSS feeds are all open, all of that stuff, so therefore that does mean that you get people coming along and using podcasts in a way that the creator doesn't want that podcast abused in terms of the copy on Anchor, arguably, Anchor makes it a little bit too easy, a little bit too simple and straightforward for podcasters to copy shows.

But at the end of the day, that's the point of Anchor. The point of Anchor is to make it easy, straightforward and make it easy to podcast.
Is it the fault of anybody? I don't think it's the fault of anybody really. I think it's just whenever you build things bad, people will work out how to use them for ill rather than for good and we just need to make sure that we watch out for that and try and get in their way as much as possible.
There was a little bit more piracy as well. That happened sometime last week as well.
You wrote about Jason Calacanis, famous from This Weekend In Startups a big VC investor in the valley. He was having his podcast clipped, so not all of it being taken a service called pod clips taking parts of it and then monetizing against his clips and he wasn't very happy. So he sent them a cease and desist letter. It seems I've taken it down, but they don't feel they did anything wrong.
It's a strange old thing. I contacted pod clips. I don't know where pod clips are. There one of these companies that hasn't even put their address on their website, which is always a bit of a concern if you go into their privacy policy and then it says it talks a little bit about Californian law, which means one of two things.

Either the company is based in California or probably more realistically, the company has copied a privacy statement from a Californian company.
But what they do is they take clips of podcast shows as a form of curation, which is fine and that's I I guess okay. But they seem to be taking the audio as well and sticking the audio on their own servers, which is no good.
So I did a technical review of how the website works and how the app works and all of the audio was being served from their own a server. It's probably a good reason for that in that dynamic ad insertion of course means that it's a little bit difficult to get accurate clips but it is also copyright theft and so they shouldn't be doing it.
So I did ask the company for clarification of their licensing agreements knowing full well they probably didn't have any given that there are companies like NPR and Vox Media on there and of course they didn't come back to me. So I think it's just one of these dodgy companies that's not quite understood how podcasts work and thinks that they can just take the audio and take the mp3 files and do whatever they like with it.

And this is a great example of pod clips taking little clips of a podcast, taking something perhaps out of context and then sticking it on there, their own website. That's clearly not what any creator would actually want.
We talked about Apple subscriptions, we know Spotify is turning on subscription soon. Now there's money in them, hills. We'll probably see a lot more of this as people start at all, if I can nick somebody else's content, stick a subscription against and get paid.
So the point I think is when it's free, it's immoral, but when it's paid and I'm losing revenue, then there's liability.
Yes, I think so. And my understanding of where Apple is moving their approval process to is that Apple is now spending their time and energy on looking at channels i.e., looking at the paid stuff rather than necessarily looking so closely at the free stuff.
And I've had quite a few people this week telling me that Apple seems to be accepting new podcast remarkably quickly, sometimes within minutes, and which has never happened in the past, but that channels are still taking a number of hours, if not days to get approved.

So perhaps that sort of Apple, changing that around a little bit.
But as soon as you dangle money in front of people, then people find different ways of using and abusing that. The reason why Anchor particularly, It's because one of the tools that typical podcast pirate uses. Firstly it's free and secondly, you can earn money out of it, you can earn money out of squeezing ads in there. You can earn money out of the anchor support stuff And we might think five or $10, that's all that they learn five or $10 in some countries. There's a lot of money and of course anchor is available everywhere, not just in the US. Any of those services. Sprecher similarly, and other free podcast services as well has that issue in that it really does make it really easy for people to copy stuff and to take other people's work and pass it off as their own.
I still have an issue about what I call podcast policing. You and I have talked about this in the past. I still think that forgetting just plagiarizing content like they did with Finding Natasha. What if it's Marty Green putting up crazy wing views or somebody who's not Marcy Green, but somebody who just says the KKK is the greatest thing since sliced bread, who is responsible?

Because if I wrote that on Twitter or I wrote that on Facebook, the AI would pick that text up and immediately bring it down. My point, we now have auto transcriptions and we now have the ability with AI.
Should Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Anchor, and all the others, captivate? Shouldn't they be looking at the content going into these and looking at the moderation on them before they post it or distribute it?
So what the law says is that a company like Libsyn in or company like whoever or Buzzsprout is a common carrier and therefore it's not, it's job to sit there and check that absolutely everything it does is legal and above board in terms of the content that it hosts, but that it should react very quickly if somebody reports that content is wrong and shouldn't be there.
Now you and I have spoken in the past about a podcast that I found on one podcast host that was just the most unpleasant thing and I reported it to that particular podcast host and the person who I reported it to, you know very well is a very nice man.

He pointed me to their terms and conditions and said it's in our terms and conditions that we're not responsible and that's where we're going to end it.
So from that point of view, I found that quite disappointing obviously. So you've got from the podcasters hosts point of view, legally they're not responsible from the publisher's point of view and the publisher, maybe the individual podcaster, It may also be of course somebody like Spotify or Apple that has a directory of shows. It's up to Apple or Spotify what shows are in their directory.
And if they want to get rid of some of the shows from their directory, then they certainly can say things like Alex Jones, for example, who is a dreadful conspiracy theorist. His show isn't in Apple anymore, although of course it's still available as an rss feed because that was a decision that Apple ended up making. What podcast index has said is we're never going to pull anything out because we don't agree with that sort of behavior.
But I think the you and I come from a different culture than some of the freedom loving americans who are quite happy to hear anything on their radio and anything on their podcast.

I caught up with Will Page,, the former chief economist at Spotify and who's the author of Tarzan Economics to ask him about piracy and who should be responsible for moderating all of this?
Hello, Great to be here.
Thanks for having me back now podcast piracy seems to be on the up. We have heard an interview earlier today from Jake Warren about the podcast Finding Natasha that was copied by somebody, put on to Anchor, given a new fresh cover and then redistributed to Apple and Spotify. Is podcast piracy is going to become an issue?
Of course it's going to become an issue always will be an issue. Piracy plays a part in just about everything that story, which will assume some level of shoplifting. And I always remember Microsoft back in the early 90s, they had an optimal level of piracy that some geeky economists actually calculated because piracy helped spread their product to emerging markets.
But going back to podcasts, I think piracy is going to be easier because people don't recognize borrowed words because you recognize borrowed music and in terms of solutions it becomes harder.

Yes, we can jump from A to B to F and assume some sort of fingerprinting tech solution is going to come down the pipe and solve all this.
That, your example of Finding Natasha what about plagiarism? Tech doesn't necessarily solve plagiarism. That's as hard as trying to stop kids cheating on their school homework.
So yes, the song remains the same, piracy will always be a problem and the solutions for podcasts gonna be different from music.
But I've got a reminder your listeners of a coat that Adam Singer gave me and you see this at the start my book, which is what it means when you have no piracy, it means you've got no demand for your products.
So there's costs, but there's also some benefits to piracy as well. Clearly this Finding Natasha is a very successful podcast, otherwise nobody would have pirated it.
So taking Finding Natasha and we'll talk about some other examples in a minute. Who's the onus on to police this? Should there be a way of fingerprinting podcasts or even if it's not piracy, there is an issue around the ability for people to put up, I don't know, libelous content or a harmful content or racist content.

It seems that podcasting is a laissez faire, do what you like field for anybody to do anything or say anything. Should Anchor, Spotify, Apple Buzzsprout, Libsyn,. all these people. Should they be predetermining what you put up and checking it for its content? or where does the issue of content ownership and liability rest?
We are in deep water here. Sam, deep water. To the Loch Ness which is deep Atlantic ocean. And I think there's a couple of points we can unpack the early stage here.
Firstly, we just discussed content moderation. I think some last four minutes a podcast and some last 40. There, you have a problem. You've got much more content to moderate on. We also have no podcast database. Very important. We have no sort of global copyright database for music, but we're definitely are lacking a global podcast database.
So tech solutions will be hindered by the fact that there's no foundation to build a case on. But a moderation just a quick point from the outset, which is, I would love to know how many tech companies right now?

Content tech companies have a content moderation team that is bigger than the legal department? Just a quick yes or no survey of the big media tech companies, I know a couple of big guns out there and the answer is a clear yes, often two or three times or twice the legal department and by the way, the gap is widening. So a) moderation is going to be tougher because it's 40 minutes, not four and b) the labor intensive nature of this content, moderation is going to be expensive and when you have a cost that grows exponentially if you like, you're going to get CFOs these companies saying if you picks up the bill.
So that's one way to look at the economics of moderation.
Back to the core part of your question I think was the safe harbor issues. So just very briefly with user generated content platforms. The trick is it a question of whether or not the platform follows a safe harbor law requirements. So what that's stressing is no quotes, actual knowledge of the imprinting content. With podcast,

I think it's easier to follow those rules because it's longer, there's no database, there's no other issues as around with music it's perhaps harder to say I didn't actually know that song was a problem. And then where you get this off takedown means stay down effect.
But with the podcast it's going to be an interesting one to follow and especially and I know that you have a very global audience on this show. But if I can just make a very British specific point. Safe harbor itself was a U. S. Law adopted or imported by the European Union, which Britain is now left.
So clearly there's a need to revisit all this, for better or for worse and not taking sides.
And you're revisiting it in a world of podcasts as opposed to a world of music content. So the foundations of this debate are going to change, especially in this country.
So what you're saying is Apple and Spotify could hide behind safe Harbor a bit like Youtube right now and wash their hands of it. So does that mean that in the Eula where the user is signing up, they'd have to put in terms and conditions that say anything that you generate that may be libelous or if you steal something or if you plagiarize you are going to be the person that goes to court, not us.

I would see that as a likely scenario in the initial stages as this nascent market plays out. But there's already twist in the tale turning out right now in James Cridland newsletter yesterday, we're reading that podcast subscriptions have arrived. Let's work this through you, Sam, responsible for everything you say on your podcast, which is going to host my platform. But I'm going to monetize it for you. Okay? So now we have a financial transaction. Is it really fair for me to wash my hands when I'm actually gonna monetize that content directly for you?
Then you can take it to the next stage, which is say and I'll take a cut of that money, I'll take a 30% fee. What Apple's done is turn podcast creators into app developers.
So if I take a cut of that fee, I got even more skin in the game, which makes it even harder to wash my hands. I'm Spotify and I'm saying I'm not taking your feet. Does that change the legal positions? I'm just, I'm not a lawyer, but I want to throw these issues out there because we need to move fast in this as well.
I think something else which is going on here to earn it. It's picked up in a report that I did on twitch, which is to understand that some of the terminology is already a little bit out of date.

So we are used to UGC user generated content. What I refer to in the twitch report is a different acronym user created content UCC not UGC and amongst the gaming community and if we're in a Twitch, that's really cool to fuse, that's, that's, that's burning now because we realize that it's not, I'm uploading my favorite Katy Perry video to Youtube and you weren't aware of it. And the record label wants to take down usual take it down using content ID. It's, I own my channel and I'm going to go over the top. you remember that broadcast expression over the top? It's a very good one to use here, over the top through Twitch to get to my consumers and I monetize that channel directly. Youtube picks it cut, I received my net share and that's the essence of the business model.
So user created content is the new chapter that we're opening up here and not user generated content. And to reiterate safe harbor worked well for UGC. I think it's going to work less well in UCC
Right, so there's a problem brewing, let's say now the technology that's available to podcast as we know how companies can auto transcribe a podcast.

Within reason they all get 90% or 95% accuracy. And AI could be used to then read that transcription. So I don't think podcast companies have a leg to stand on these days.
Maybe 10 years ago when we weren't transcribing or auto transcribing podcast, they could have hidden behind the it's 4 40 minutes or in Joe Rogan's, case four hours. How we're going to moderate that with humans? We'll never scale it.
But they should be able to scale that now very easily. When we upload this podcast to Buzzsprout, we set an auto transcribe option in Descript. So it's already then added to Buzzsprout. So either Buzzsprout on the upload process can check for keywords or key phrases or or certain other fingerprints so that they might turn around and say, Uh-oh sorry Sam, you've got some naughty words in there or I think you're actually saying things that are anti vax. Although you might be saying that there's Jewish lasers that kill forest fires in California, those stupid things like that and they might say no we're not going to host you on that basis.

So I'm just wondering will they be able to hide behind it until there's a legal challenge? Is that what they're going to do?
So I think that the transcript point you make is really interesting and it highlights how tech can get us to a solution for piracy that is but perhaps it will still struggle with a solution for plagiarism.
So we got two key to play around with piracy. I would imagine some sort of fingerprinting solutions can evolve from that AI reading. But plagiarism, I think it's going to be harder. So the problem moves on.
So let's say in 18 months time I'm back on your podcast is blasting. Okay, remember the days when we used to steal each other's podcast and stick pointing detached home with a different branding. Now we just steal the content and we preach it as our own.
What did John Lennon say, a great artist borrows and even better artists steals. So we have that kind of trade off there were going back to the AI being used with transcripts. It is possible now where you can take a paragraph of text which has been produced my podcast and move it up to the front of the transcript and that moves the words up to the front. So that makes pattern recognition, which is already going to be harder in podcasts and it is for music.
Even harder with regards to piracy and AI is on impossible with regards to plagiarism. It's going to be easier to copy your friends school homework and harder for the teacher to get you out.

So one solution being proposed is by Adam Curry and Dave Jones in the podcast index. They've got a new tag called The License Tag which from what I understand and Dave's on the show today. So we'll find out later.
It's very similar to the creative commons license that was put up for imagery that came around the time of flicker and the idea is that the user created content owner could say, okay will this podcast I've got no, I don't want anyone to copy it. It has a license that says it's mine and mine only no copying allowed or you're allowed to take some clips out of it. Nothing more than that. And I'm happy with that. But you must name check my podcast or you can have the do what you like with my podcast take it away cut it up, chop it up, replay it, sell it if you want to because I couldn't.
So maybe a license around podcasting is the way to go forward.
No, it sounds to me like you're beginning to swim in the waters of creative commons here and in a prior life of six years, I was asleep, economists of the human rights society, which I know are trying to work out how to license podcast.

We'll leave that for another day when we've got enough paracetamol. and Ibuprofen.
But when we think about creative commons and certainly when you're at the PRS you mentioned that word, I think you got fired, but I don't want to take a cynical view on this one. But I do want to flag something for your listeners, which is remember it's an irreversible decision.
So we're all trying to figure this out. You and James doing a great job helping us try and figure this out. That part newsletters is teaching us about something we just simply don't know enough about. But with creative commons, it is irreversible. And do you really want to give it away. So let's take your music analogy, you do this song, can you kick it? and you release it in the 90s and you think that's fine, it's all done and dusted.
And then Vodafone call you up in 2010, we say we want David Beckham to your TV commercial for us, with, can you kick it? Thank God you held onto that copyright all of a sudden you putting your kids through college. Whereas the creative commons, if you go down that path, it is irreversible.

So, I question just should we be discussing irreversible decisions at this early stage whilst we try and figure this out? I just want to throw that risk in there for the listeners.
Another thing which I think is worth applying here, and it's analogy that I'm actually using quite a lot, which is shopping malls, which sounds like they have nothing to do with podcast. But I'm using it a lot to try and understand the Apple text debate which is going on between Epic and Apple in America and more noticeably Spotify and Apple in the European Union.
But it simply says who built them all? It's not ring system. Apple build them all. And they populate that mall with lots of shops including Spotify, Deezer, Google, Stitcher and so on apps. There are shops. So who sets the rules for that mall?
So where do we have a situation where the owner of the shopping mall tells you what license you can and can't use or is it devolved? I'm going to use that word devolved here. I think it's a very good legal word, not lawyer, but you understand the Scottish independence debate devolve down to the retail establishments inside that mall to use their own license.

And I think that's a really important one we have to wrestle with at an early stage, which is whose licenses in any way the creator of them all, My house, my rules, or is it for the users of the retail establishments in that role? Your shop, your rules.
And I think that's a really interesting way to think about how competition law will play out here to end it.
There really were talking about Apple, let's say that the podcast app store taking a cut of the money now with subscriptions, but somebody like Buzzsprout or Libsyn or Captivate uploading a podcast that I host to them directly. Where's the money slices happening? Who's taking the ownership of it? And where is the liability within that? I think.
Just to walk up on that one, which is just to stress the knee jerk reaction is, oh, it's my money, it's my rules. I can see how listeners will jump to a conclusion there. But one of the incredible things with the Apple app store is the way they've managed to handle fraud and payment systems and invest in systems that doesn't come for free. That's not free lunch. It doesn't hang on trees, huge infrastructure there.

Now if Apple can ignite a huge podcast subscription market where payment systems are frictionless and fraud is minimized, then you've got to give them a hat to say you build that mole so you set the rules.
But if you had rules for each individual podcast or licenses speech into the new podcast or it might be harder to enforce that payment solution. And that's where the shopping mall analogy comes in. The customer wants to know the good to the mall, they're gonna have a safe experience. There are rules that need to be done at the central base and there are rules which can be devolved down to the individual.
That's the train and I just want to really flag that Twitch report is not bragging rights here, but that Twitch report at TarzanEconomics.com/twitch, you'll see it. It's just a really groundbreaking study of what happens when it's user created content that setting the rules as opposed to user generated real quick.
You've got examples where people on Twitch are using Patreon and Kickstarter to monetize their content on Twitch. Now we've got two platforms with their own sets of rules on top of another platform, set rules and a creator that owned the channel and goes over the tops of consumer.

This is how uncharted waters we are now in because there's no legal framework to understand what the heck is going on.
I guess it's time for somebody to get sued, the legal framework to be in place..
Actually, you don't want to give it to the courts. You want effective dispute resolution at the platform level. That's key for all this. Having Apple text decided in the court is not the best way forward. Having it done between willing buyer willing seller always produces better outcomes. If anything, don't leave it to lawyers
Will Page, the author of Tarzan Economics. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Sam, I love the show.
The dulcet tones of Will Page, there. Sam tell me a little bit about pod ping.
We talked about it last week pumping and it's away obviously of increasing the speed of being allowed to have your podcast when you upload it to your host, then your hosts allowing a directory like podcast index to then say, yep, it's available and it appears on your client.
Now I know a little bit about this, but I thought I was going to find a man who learns a lot more.

That's Dave Jones. But I also wanted to ask him about the new podcast license tag because again, going back to the theme of this week's podcast about piracy, I thought maybe there's a way around all of this piracy issue to create a creative commons type tag license.
Hello, I'm joined today by Dave Jones, the Chief Developer at Podcast Index.
Dave, how are you?
Doing great, Sam. Thanks, man.
Good. Now, Dave I'm really curious. You've just launched recently the license tag. Can you tell us more about what the license tag is?
They'll be in the next phase, would be phase three of the podcast, Namespace and we have already done believe ten tags? If I'm not mistaken, there will be probably three more in this phase, which will finish on June the first and I finish what I mean is there will be a review period, new changes and submissions and that kind of thing will stop.
We will review everything, make sure that everybody's comfortable with what the tags look like.

And then we will formalize them into the actual podcast name Space. The license tag is one of those. So it's going to be uh trailer tag, the license tag and alternate enclosure.
The license tag specifically came about because copyright doesn't always do enough. You can retain a copyright, which is fine, but you can't always go the next step in the rss feed and express how you're going to license that content to other parties. Now, clearly you want the listener to hear it, but who's in between? That's where the license tag comes in.
And an app or directory or a platform may want to take your content and re host it on their own servers or something like that.
So this is giving the creator the ability to specify in detail how they want their content to be handled down the chain as it gets to the listener. So with the license tag, is it very similar to creative commons?

Is that where you were aiming at? So will there be degrees of licensing? So will I have full license? Did not touch my content? Or is there going to be a, you can have bits of my content but attribute it to me or take away all my content and do what you will with it.
Is there going to be degrees of license levels? It really can just be totally free and open. There's some guidance in there. This says, we recommend that you use a pre existing license just because the licensing is hard. I mean, There are whole companies spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop their own license and make it legally binding in as many countries as possible to make sure the wording is correct so that there's no loopholes, blah blah blah on and on.
And so it's really recommended that you use a pre existing licenses like Creative commons. And so to that effect, we recommend in the document in the Namespace space document that you choose from the S. P. D. X. License list which is a common open source list of vetted and popular licenses and you've got creative commons on their MIT GPL.

All those the ones that everybody's familiar with. We recommend in the spec that you choose one of those just because it's easier. But there's also the ability inspector just free form a name of a license and then refer to a U. R. L. In the license tag that gives the full body content of the license wording, so you can really roll your own and just call it whatever name you want to, in the tag and then referenced the full detailed wording right there in the tag as a URL so that people can link out to it and read it. Hopefully.
I'm not sure they'll read it. That's the problem. But anyway, at least it's there. The reason I ask is because this week Jake Warren for Message Heard had his podcast, which is doing really well in the Apple charts at number five. It was totally stolen, pirated and uploaded to Anchor. They changed the cover up and they pushed it back out to Apple, Spotify, and Google, as if it was their own podcast. Now, luckily for Jake, there was no monetary loss because he wasn't charging for it, but he had traffic loss and which is also to make the matter worse.

The story was about his mother, so he felt a little bit more personally aggrieved. Do you think, two questions I guess, one who should be responsible for policing that? Is there a way to police that so that somebody can't pirate or plagiarize or steal someone's podcast and two, will this license if adopted by others, but let's just use the podcast index, will this license help detect and prevent that?
That's a kind of a multifaceted issue there. And so I think there's a few different pieces to that. The simple answer is ultimately the hosting company that's hosting that content, if it's Pirated, they're responsible for it. The sort of complicating factor is there is no expression of a license within rss feeds currently that I know of, it's a little bit of a legal gray area ultimately.
But just from a pure ethical standpoint, the podcasting platform that allowed that thing to happen, they really should be policing that better and we really see this on the free hosts a lot out there.

They are bad about allowing somebody just create account and rip off content. That's why we created the Lock Tag in Phase One. It was the very first tag that we created was to try to stop this from happening and I would be really interested and actually hosted question to James on our message board last night asking him, I wonder if all of these podcasts that are moving hosts from paid to free hosts every month.
I wonder how many of those are violating the lock tag as it stands because we know that a lot of them do have the lock tag enabled.
Now of course that's not binding in any way, but it is a ethical thing in the industry. There's been an expression here. We do not want other hosts to be able to import our content without the owner of the feed going in and turning that lock off. And if these free hosts are doing that, if they're allowing that import in violation of the lock tag, then they need to be publicly shamed for it. I think that the industry has spoken loudly and said, we don't want this, and if they're doing it, that's something that they need to be held to account for.

And the other part of that, is there a way to detect whether or not that's in violation? And there probably is, but it's very messy because a lot of times what we see with fraud feeds, especially pirated content, they changed just enough, the ones that are good at it. You know, those guys will change just enough about the feed in order to evade just pure sort of brute force detection there.
So they'll put a slightly different piece of the title of an episode or the feed itself, they won't use the same author, they'll use a deviation of that. They will not name the enclosure file names the same. So they do a lot of stuff like that, just slight changes to make that difficult.
It really would come down to audio level analysis and I'm not sure that would totally work either. But anyway, that's what I'm seeing it. I forgot about the lock tag, I think that's a great way of at least indicating your intent that you don't want this copied and then hopefully the industry adheres to your intent.

If nothing else.
We know the lockdown has been out there for what, six months now. So I think at this point it's time for us to step back and look at what's happening. It's been out there long enough and there are lots and lots of feeds.. I can tell you from looking at the podcast index, there are many feeds, I'm not sure how many, but it's got to be well over 200,000 feeds that have the lock tag enabled in it.
So the likelihood that something is being violated is probably pretty high. The only other thing on that would be that there's some big hosts that still have not put that in there. And I would say that there's no excuse not to really at this point. If you're a big hosting platform and you're worried about people pirating your content, you really need to stick that in there, at least that way you can legitimately publicly shame them if they do.
So, that's one part that I wanted to talk to you about was the plagiarism. And the other part though, just to get your opinion, because I don't think it's something you directly involved in. Should podcasting host though, use auto transcription and AI to look at the physical policing of content within podcast or is that something that Adam might roll around on the floor and kick his legs up in the end screen?

You know, you're not allowed to do that. It's a it's a free speech platform and stop trying to prevent that because my worry is you're going to get something like a Marty Green, put out a podcast where she goes, I can say anything I like within this and it could be hate speech, It could be anything again. Should we as podcasters be ready for this before it becomes a legal issue by addressing it in some way? Or do we have to just wait for somebody to challenge a hosting company and sue them?
Ultimately, that will be where it comes down to if you want to get a real answer to it. But I don't think that that is really that much of a thorny issue with us. Our standpoint is as from a directory approach, we as the directory don't want to be policing is you don't want your routers on the internet or your B G P routers policing content and those things just need to pass content and let the policing happened at a higher layer of the chain.
So I think that really at the hosting company level, each one has to make their own decisions. We see that with DNS too. There's this constant battle in the cybersecurity realm of trying to police DNS providers who host, command and control server.

DNS names and that kind of thing. No, we don't. You don't want to necessarily come down on DNS itself and try to programmatically put something into DNS to make it, where that can't happen.
What you do is you don't take her with the protocol, you go to the host that's violating it and say, hey, you got some bad content on your system and let them decide what they do with it.
So I think programmatic analysis, I'm not opposed to it really, it's just that what do you do with it when you find something I saw yesterday on Twitter that somebody had been delisted off of apples A. P. I. And they think it was because they mentioned the Israeli Palestinian conflict, don't, who knows, there's been no communication about it or why or if that was indeed the case. And you can imagine that somebody within Israel or within Palestine may have different sides of that issue and then versus somebody in a different country.
So really those decisions I think have to be very local to the publishing or to the hosting company and I'm not opposed to that happening on that level, it just gets really like a really thorny mess once you get, I guess lower down the chain there.

Okay. We'll see how that's handled by podcasting host when they get challenged. Now, having you on here is amazing because I know you're so busy, but could you just give us a little bit of a update on what's happening with pod ping? Because I know you've been working that, how's that going? And maybe you can explain very quickly what is popping again to those who are listening.
So popping has been dominating my time lately, more and more so than I thought. But it's a replacement for web sub, within the podcasting world. So it's specific to podcasting. The problem with web sub really is the amount of subscription level traffic that's required to maintain it. You have to re subscribe to every individual feed that you want to get a website paying for.
And so for a directory like ours were running up on four million feeds Now it's just unusable almost. Or we have servers that are dedicated to just re subscribing to the web subs all day long. That's all they do is just re subscribe because your limit is about 15 days maximum on a web sub subscription.

One of the other issues is that server only. It uses web hooks. If you are going to subscribe to web sub to be notified, you have to have a server somewhere. Apps can't do it directly themselves.
So popping is a wave is just a way for there to be one central location on the web where any host can send a ping as soon as a feed publishes a new episode and that notification with the feed, Euro goes onto the Hive Blockchain which is a global blockchain that updates it with a new block every three seconds. So typically, once a new episode is published, you see an episode show up on the block or U. R. L. Show up on the blockchain within about 40 seconds total as it goes through the pipeline.
And that's something that anybody can subscribe to. Everybody can watch the chain, apps can, servers can and as soon as that happens, as soon as you begin to publish your new episodes through pod ping, then everybody can stop pulling you so you don't have this incessant, never ending energy consuming traffic going on all day long from everybody else trying to pull your feeds all the time.

One thing that we noticed Is that currently we have 3.8 million feeds in the index. The top, Let's see. 3.4 million of those feeds are within 25 different hosting companies. So you have almost the entire batch on, what is that, 88%. Almost the entire known podcast world Is within that top 25 hosting companies.
So it's really not a big ask to just get those 25 hosts to start sending pings to the system and then you can spend your time, you spend the majority of your time hitting those other smaller, disparate the diaspora of the rest of the podcast world is spread out, which is really where most of the polling should be.
We shouldn't be polling for the host that has 100,000 feeds, they should just be, they should be telling us that they have a new episode, not the other way around.
So, who so far started to support it so far we got Buzzsprout is sending RSS.com is sending Captivate.fm is sending and I just talked to John and Justin over a transistor yesterday and they're going to start sending here shortly so we're still in a beta test phase.

Everything is fully functional. It works well but we're sort of on boarding hosts a little bit at a time starting with the people we know like to be early adopters with things and so far, running solid not having any problems.
Excellent. Dave, you and I briefly spoke about if I'm listening to your podcast and I want to tell a friend oh it at minute 28 you should listen to this and we didn't have a resolution. I know there's the new recommendation tag but I don't know if you saw Spotify use the time extension to the U R L bit like you can do in Youtube and I thought that was a great way because it's a standard as well for just simply saying at minute 28 equals T equals the time and I can take that URL and share it with anybody I want. And suddenly that lands them straight into the middle of the podcast at the exact point I want, I don't know if you saw that and what your thoughts were.
That's really cool. And it turns out that some of the apps, the podcasting 2.0 apps that use the index

as their API. They were already doing that Podfriend. I think Podverse does it as well and it seems to be a universal URL scheme. Martin Mouritzen, the developer of Porfriend recommended that I do that and I was like, oh this is not going to work, And then I stuck it on there and he's like, hey, it just works.
I didn't even know that it was great. It's like this, there's so much out there like that. Every time we propose a new tag or something like that on the Namespace, somebody will pop up and say there's already this thing over here that's doing that.
And the landscape of this stuff is so broad. There's so many things that already happening that you don't even know about even as a seasoned web developer like Martin. No, I think it's great stuff like that's awesome. It's like you get it for free.
Just gotta expose it in the UIs now. Dave Jones. Thank you so much. Congratulations with everything you've been doing on the podcast Index It has moved the needle so far. So thank you for all your hard work.
Thanks Sam, appreciate it.
Dave Jones from Podcast Index. You can find out more at Podcast Index.com.
We've got a big announcement, Apple subscriptions that it's finally arrived. James.
IOS 14.6 arrived along with the Mac OS 11.4 release.

Have you signed up to any subscriptions?
So this is the paid subscriptions. I have not yet bought a paid subscription and I probably should do nor have I actually signed up and launched a channel yet and maybe I should launch a channel first. Sam have you done any of those things?
I signed up through wish to to create all the podcasts, my radio shows as I've talked about before, which is really good and of course channel suddenly arrived. So I went into Apple podcast connect, created a channel and just simply added all the radio shows into there. I was quite impressed here. The problem is I can't find the radio channel when I go and look for it in Apple podcast. I'm not sure where to find it.
I'm not quite sure how channels work at all. To be honest. I haven't yet found one. I'm not somebody that uses Apple podcasts and so therefore from that point of view, I don't know too much about that. Certainly looking is it called River radio by any marvelous chance?
Yeah, that might be useful.
Yes.

In which case all I can see is shows and episodes and I can't necessarily understand where a channel would be. So perhaps I need to sit down and actually have a play with this and see if I can understand it. Apple have done some very good and very clever thinking behind how this system works.
And it seems to be a very flexible system if you are a podcast publisher and you want to make podcasts available for a payment. And did you have any problems when you were signing up? Because you've ponied up the money, haven't you? To be able to sell the subscription if you want to in the future. Was that sort of relatively easy?
They took the money very quick, very good at that. They didn't have a problem taking my money. So the 1799 was very rapidly removed. I'm just looking on my iPhone. I can't find channels and I can't find my own, but I can't find others either. Maybe they just turned that on in same 14.6.1. But I also tried to turn on the new podcast subscriptions as an affiliate and that I'm afraid I abandoned ship on because it seemed to be too long.

They're asking for War and Peace and I didn't have time. So I haven't signed up for the affiliate program. Any luck with you there James?
I've been signed up to the affiliate program for some time. I did try signing up the other day, and of course that didn't work. I reported it and the good folks at Apple came back and they said, oh, it was only a problem. If you said that you were a promoter and it's fixed now, that's not quite how I understand it.
But anyway, if they say it's fixed, then they say it's fixed and that's all fine. I can't see in those tools quite how you find channels either. But I do notice that weirdly, I have actually earned something recently on the Apple podcasts affiliate thing. So I need to understand what it is that I have actually sold and how I can do more of that will be nice.
I've used an affiliate link for all of the apple links for the last couple of years on the pod news podcast pages purely so I can measure how many clicks I'm actually getting there because of course nothing is actually earned any money.

So I need to understand a little bit more about that. But that's a crafty idea. If you're a podcaster who is promoting stuff on Apple podcasts, paid subscriptions, you get 50% of the first month. So it could theoretically be quite a lot of cash for you. So that's interesting to end up seeing. One of the other facts that you revealed in pod news was Apple now earns more from the app store in the entire music industry earns from music.
So if there are any more from the app store, I'm assuming they will earn more eventually from the podcast store as well.
Yes, I don't know whether the app store would include podcast, paid podcasts, subscriptions or not, but just the 30% that Apple earns from everybody's selling stuff on the app store means that Apple are raking in the cash. There. There are currently a number of different court cases of course going on one with epic games in the U. S. About the app store.
There's another court case which is going on in europe as well where the European Commission has accused Apple of doing all kinds of naughty things.

So I think that's certainly something to just air in mind but they're earning an awful lot of money out of the app store and out of essentially taking that 30% commission. Let's see if the court actually reduces that 30%, which is I think going to be the outcome. I think that's to be the compromise. Okay enough Apple.
Sam, a Twitter, yes. Gosh. It's now launched ticketed spaces so now we can charge if we wanted to James for space. I think we should try that.
Yes, if we lived in the U. S. Of course because in typical American fashion it's only available to people like us but not people like us. So yes they are making it possible to charge for a Twitter space. Anybody who wants to charge has to have 1000 followers were all okay there. We have to have hosted three spaces in the last 30 days and we need to be at least 18 years old. They're using Stripe and that users will receive 80% of the revenue after Apple and Google's in app purchase fees are taken so wait a minute.

So Apple and Google's in-app purchase fees are 30% So you'll receive 80% of the 70% that you'll receive. So you will receive not that much in comparison. What's that? 60 something percent?
And Stripe has handling fees as well by the way.
Of course and Stripe has handling fees of course as well. But anyway, yes, it's been interesting. I was on Clubhouse the other day and there was a man on there talking to me about podcasts and I was actually invited to be on this particular clubhouse space.
So I thought, oh, it's going to be interesting to have a quick look and see what this is. But my goodness. It was just the worst experience that I've ever. It was this guy who for a start sniffed every second sentence that he would say anything that was his big loud sniff, which already was a little bit annoying. I looked him up because I didn't know who he was, he's a podcast expert. I didn't know who was there.

So I looked him up and his podcast had eight different RSS feeds, eight of them, of which seven were dormant. And he'd literally tried every single free podcast host out there. I listened to a little bit of his latest show And his show had, for example, a little segment in there that started about four minutes in, which was a segment with a reverend.
And that same segment, he played again in his show, 42 minutes in. So he'd actually repeated the same segment more than once, but he's the expert and clearly, I don't know anything. And these are the people who are telling other podcasters how everything works. And I'm just there thinking, wow, if you're using Clubhouse to get information from the experts like that, then just be really clear who the people are.
Just do your due diligence on who these experts are and whether or not you would actually take some of their advice to heart because literally everything he was saying was wrong. Yeah, but that could have been in a Twitter space as well.

I don't think that's a clubhouse issue. I think that's just a it could it could also have been on a Facebook group as well. I think again, it does show this, it shows this one of the problems with these sorts of services.
And if you then start charging for it as well, if you're charging for bad advice, then that again is going to be very interesting to come back to your earlier point sam what do we do there? Should somebody be sitting there and monitoring the advice and working out whether the advice is any good and whether or not they can have their money.
The point about Clubhouse, you're right James. Moderation is an issue and I think twitter space is going to have the same problem. My wife used to run Microsoft MSN and one of the things they had to do was closed down the chat rooms because they were getting pedophiles, they were getting all sorts of imagery in there and they couldn't monitor it. And the UK police turned around and said if you're not going to monitor it, then you have to close it. And that's what they did.
They just couldn't find a way to provide enough monetization and I think clubhouse is going to find the same thing.

It's that same issue. I think podcasting will have to address this at some point, which is the moderation of podcast and especially if they're monetizing them because someone is going to sue someone at some point and they're gonna sue them for a lot of money for defamation or for something else.
And I don't think safe harbor, which Will was talking about or any of the other means where they can put their hands up and saying mea culpa, not me, Gov, I didn't do it. I don't think it's gonna sit and I think clubhouse says in their terms and conditions, they're not listening into the rooms.
And so if they're not listening in and if Twitter spaces says they're not listening in and if coast companies aren't moderating podcast content, it's a bit of a free for all until somebody sues somebody and then everyone's going to clamp down.
Indeed, it's going to be interesting to watch and I think particularly it changes things when you start charging money for it as well. It's certainly something to keep an eye on and see what happens there.

They did find it one interesting thing in that Twitter spaces announcement, they're using Stripe not Square, very odd.
Yes, you have thought that given that Jack then square, why on earth would you not use that? Although quite a lot of the square stuff only works in the US as well. So perhaps that's part of it. I don't know.
Twitter space is only available in the U. S.
You make or at least paid stuff is yes, you make a good point. Maybe you and I should have a Twitter space and maybe we should have a player on Twitter spaces one day. In fact, maybe we should do that tomorrow Sam.
Let's do that tomorrow James and see if anyone even turns up.
So you need to be following either me, I'm James Cridland or Sam he's Sam Sethi all one word on Twitter, you will see us. If you're following one of us, we can't do it under the pod land news handle because we don't have enough followers yet. But if you see one of us in the purple thing, I think it's going to be roughly watch, we say if it's this sort of time, then it's six PM Australian standard time and I'm U K time. Should we go for that?

Let's try nine o'clock in the morning.
Yeah, we don't want to wake people up too early.
Six o'clock in the evening Australian time and if you're in America tough.
Tough.
We'll see if anybody joins us. That might be fun.
Now let's get away from this piracy stuff. Google someone seems too shook the tree again. They've added into Google chrome a follow button for bringing back Google Reader. What's this one all about James?
So this is on android and this is,
That's why I couldn't find it.
Yes, and it's currently on the Canary feed or something, so you're not even going to see it even if you're on Beater, but there is a follow button in your browser on android and apparently that is been rss feeder, so you can follow an rss link and you can then go to another view in Google reader and you can see the updates from the rss feeds.
Now I found out who was running that Google and I asked them on Twitter, oh this is really cool, wouldn't it be cool if there was some form of integration between this feature and Google podcasts and they came back and they said, oh, that's a good idea, I'll look into that, which means that there isn't.

So there's surprise two sets of people at Google doing things and rebuilding wheels. but nevertheless, it's always interesting seeing Google taking a look into rss again, if you're using something like Power Press or you're using a site like that to captivate site or whatever, then actually that's pretty cool because that rss feed will contain your latest posts of course, but will also contain your latest podcast audio in there as well.
So, who knows, that might be an interesting thing. And of course, Buzzsprout sites ought to work on that as well.
Can I just say, I'll never trust Google? So I wouldn't bother trying that feature next time. Thank you, Grumpy Sam..
Yes, you're absolutely right. They will kill it in about a week's time.
That's my problem. Ever since I used to love the Google reader. It was my favorite way of getting content and use and I subscribe to stuff as I went around the web and a beautiful curated list of Google rss feeds and then they suddenly killed reader and then I just gave up. And then if you look at the graveyard of Google products, I never invest into them because they never sustain anything for any length of time.

Yes, Now I think there's quite a lot of truth to be said there and I think even when they do get behind a product, they don't promote it properly. They don't go out and shout about it and I run a pixel phone but Google pixel phones never sell particularly well because they never promote them particularly. We never do the deals with the carriers and I don't know you see all of this stuff.
They are market leader for many things. Their market leader for smart speakers in most countries. They're market leaders for mobile phone operating systems of course. But most of that is left to other manufacturers to also help them and Google is a bit of a frustrating organization and by the way, we don't know who's in charge of Google podcasts anymore, but there used to be a guy called Gay Bender who was running Google podcasts who left about a month or so ago. Zack Reneau-Wedeen who used to run Google podcasts has long gone and he is now working on Search for mobile. We don't know whether there is actually a product manager for Google podcast and certainly Google podcasts.

the app appears to be moving the old button around here and there, but that's about as far as we go.
So, those of us wanting a good, strong competitor for the Apple and Spotify oligopoly, sadly we're not really seeing that yet and that's a bit of a shame.
Just going back to this Google rss reader thing. I wonder if Apple are listening, could they put channels into Safari? There's a thing Safari I find fascinating in that Safari is the only choice if you're running an iPad or you're running an iPhone. Yes, you can download something that says it's Chrome, but it's still using Safari behind the hood because it uses the same web browser that Apple uses because them's the rules.
So the only one where the only operating system where you can actually use a different browser is the Mac. Safari is a whole other kettle of fish that's worth while having a look into.
It was just a thought because I can't, as we said, we can't find channels. I wonder if they're going to reveal them as a way of finding them through Safari, but who knows?

Yes. Or maybe we're just not searching properly.
Okay.
Maybe it's user error. It usually is.
We'll talk about that tomorrow.
And I think that's it. Just before we go. Sam if you found any new exciting podcasts this week?
I'm going to have to listen to Finding Natasha. That's a lazy way out of me answering that question. And what about you James?
I think that's a good plan. I have been listening to 20,000 Hz, which is a wonderful podcast around audio and that sort of thing. They did a podcast and episode not so long back about the Shure SM7, which is the dynamic microphone that many podcasters have. It's really interesting. It is actually a paid for show by Shure, but it is still really interesting to go and have a listen to and understand a bit more about how that microphone came to be and why the microphone is so good and why it was so revolutionary.
It is of course the microphone that Michael Jackson used to sing into as well as so many different podcasters also using as well worth a listen. It's 20,000 hertz and what's happened for you in Portland this week.

So I've set up a channel in Apple podcast and I'm doing the final configuration of all those podcasts, 25 of them to be precise, James. So a little bit of work there and then maybe like Finding Nemo. I'll go and find my Channel.
I'm currently working on a podcast day 24, which is, it's the Planet's Podcasting Conference. It's a 24 hour podcast conference. My bit is live and in person in Sydney and New South Wales in Australia. Looking forward to seeing loads of really good people speaking there, we've even got a speaker from New Zealand, although that person will be on a video. It's well worth going to.
You'll find all of the details at PodcastDay24.com and also tonight at about one o'clock in the morning. I'm talking at a BBC podcast festival. By the time you hear that it will be too late. But it's really nice to see the BBC doing a little bit of work in terms of this area as well.
And that's it for this week. Come back to pod land next time you can follow us in your podcast app or were at Podland.news on the web.

So if you have any comments or questions, please send a voice comment to questions at pod land dot news or tweet us @podlandnews. If you want daily news, you should get pod news. The newsletter is free at podnews.net. The podcast is in your podcast app and that's where you'll find the links for all the stories we've mentioned this week. Our music is from Ignite Jingles. We used clean feed and riverside and I think a bit of zoom and were hosted and sponsored by BuzzSprout.
Please tell your friends and colleagues about pod land would love if they joined us and we'll see you in Portland next week. And if you're around and you've heard this, we'll see you on twitter spaces tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon if you're in Australia.

Podcast piracy or defamation, should podcast hosts monitor the content or could a new podcast license be the simple fix to the problem?
Podcast piracy or defamation, should podcast hosts monitor the content or could a new podcast license be the simple fix to the problem?
replay_10 forward_10
1.0x