In my mind, the podcast universe is a very nice universe filled with unicorns and rainbows. In this post you will see that’s not perfectly true.
Podcast piracy
This week I had a call with one of my first customer. The goal of it was to collect feedback from my oldest and beloved customers ❤️. We were talking about the future of Podmytube and the things I should improve on my service. I talked about these calls in my previous post.
By the way, he quietly told me that his biggest pain was a clone feed registered with the same name and content on podcasts platforms. My first reaction was
What ? How is this possible ? Why someone would do this kind of thing ? Are there malicious person on this podcast universe ? ?️
In fact Yes there are malicious people in this universe too. A quick search on google showed me that two feeds are actually registered with the name of my customer podcast.
These two results are showing two “Le Mug Nowtech” registered on the Apple podcasts catalog. If you are going on both results you will see that they are sharing :
- same title
- almost same list of episodes (the cloned feed is not quite up to date)
Conclusion : This cloned podcast is clearly a malicious one.
But ! Why cloning someone else feed ?
Why would someone duplicate the feed and register it on every podcast catalogs ? After all it’s a little work to grab feed, episodes make some update, and hosting everything on your own server. It will cost you some more money with the bandwidth costs.
The answer is simple. As always it’s a question of money.
On some podcast platforms (like anchor.fm) if your podcast has even a small audience you will begin to earn some money. Genuinely, these platforms are thinking : If he is registering one podcast, he probably is the owner. the more a podcast will gain in audience the more it will be monetized. If you really are the owner, this is a good thing. Every kind of work should be paid.
In this case, I think this is not fair. Jerome is working on his channel since 2017, is paying to have his podcast hosted by me and someone else is taking advantage of his work, of his audience, of his community to gain money. Not only Jerome’s audience is listening on ads during episodes but he is not gaining one cent with it. Neither he nor his audience chose to have advertisement on this podcast.
What to do about podcast piracy ?
If your podcast is maliciously duplicated and registered on podcast platforms, the first thing to do is to find who is hosting the feed registered on Apple podcast. Why apple podcast ? Because it’s the main podcast catalog.
Then you should report the malicious feed to the host. That’s what I’ve done with Anchor.fm (which is hosting this malicious feed). I was pleasantly surprised to see that they answered me in a few minutes about this problem. They seems to be aware of it and asked me to fill one more form. Jerome (as the true owner) will do that soon and I hope this will stop this feed being hosted by Anchor.
Next, this malicious feed should be reported to any podcast catalog if you want it to disappear. For doing so here are he October 2020 links to do so.
Apple podcast.
Apple is taking great care of content owner. Their form is quite explicit.
To access it, go there https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/itunesstorenotices/
Google podcast.
Google as Apple is taking great care of its user and it will let you fill a dedicated form.
Google : https://support.google.com/googleplay/podcasts/contact/page_dispute
Spotify
Spotify is the most recent actor in the podcast universe and I did not meet this problem so often. The only place to report one podcast piracy is their contact form. this one is accessible there https://support.spotifyforpodcasters.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000956072
Stitcher
Stitcher has a long career in the podcast universe but it is little known. To report podcast piracy you should fill the contact form here https://stitcher.helpshift.com/a/stitcher-partners/?p=all&contact=1
Hope this will help you to defend yourself.