Who moved my RSS feed?
Of course, it is far easier to generate new content every day by aggregating other people’s writings into your own website than writing them yourself. Then RSS is a, if not the, right technology to achieve this. (Praval recommends this old article which is a nice and straightforward account of RSS)
However, it would be a cliché to say RSS is a double-edged sword which can be used either for good or bad. RSS Feed Hijacking has already been real and present, spawning much discussion among bloggers/podcasters in the past couple of weeks. It is not unconceivable that the very new RSS Hijacking techinques will be prevalent in future days and eventually take over its elder brother of Domain Name Hijacking in the family of cyber-squatting.
Colette Vogele, an American IP lawyer who is representing Vegan.com (the allegedly first victim of RSS Hijacking in history) proffered four points to fight against RSS squatting:
1. You should check all the podcast directories and search engines to be sure that their RSS feeds are pointing to your official URL/RSS feed. (Though, in iTunes and possibly others, this information may not be readily available or obvious.)
2. If you learn of a hijacking, you can write to the hijacker and demand that she or he stop their conduct.
3. You can also write to the podcast directories and search engines to point out the bad actor’s conduct.
4. And, of course, you can consult a lawyer about possible claims against the hijacker.
This is an excitingly (sadly) new area both for lawyers and podcasters. (Wikipedia does not have any entry on RSS Hijiacking. Why not start one? ) I will alos have a close look at its development.
Thanks for helping to make the community aware of one of the pitfalls of rss. My client at Vegan.com has also published an article (http://vegan.com/issues/2005/podjacking.pdf) that gives some very practical strategies to dealing with the hijacker. One good tip he offers is to not contact the hijacker until you’ve announced on your own podcast that some listeners may be listening through an unauthorized feed, and announced the correct feed. Tell listeners that the unauthorized feed(s) may be discontinued any day. Also, it’s a good idea to include your copyright notice verbally in the podcast, along with any sort of licensing of your podcast — like licenses under Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org). Doing these things will protect you because if the hijacker doesn’t agree to work with you to minimize the disruption for the listeners on the authorized feed, you’ve at least given the listeners some notice that they need to check their feed and subscribe to the official feed.
Comment by Colette — December 21, 2005 @ 4:45 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful post. You can learn more about how to survive a rss-feed hijacking at this article written by my client at Vegan.com: http://vegan.com/issues/2005/podjacking.pdf.
Comment by Colette — December 21, 2005 @ 4:48 pm