A Code of Practice for podcast migrations

This is a suggested code of practice for podcast hosting companies who offer migration/copies/imports of podcasts from another podcast host.

It’s a simple set of promises, ideally to be “owned” by an industry body such as the Podcast Standards Project or similar.

This document is deliberately low-level, and intended to give as little friction to podcast hosting companies to import shows in the course of winning business. It is intended to ensure that podcast directories aren’t deluged with illicit copies of copyrighted material, particularly those that are designed to earn money from existing podcasts.

When a podcast is imported into your service:

• Respect the podcast:locked tag: do not import a podcast until the original creator removes an existing “lock”.
• Support the podcast:locked tag in your own hosting service.
• Ensure that the original creator is made aware of the import taking place. At a bare minimum, send an email to the address in the feed if there is one, alerting them that a user has started a migration process and giving them a contact.

Wait for the redirect before making money

The way that a podcast migration is achieved is a 30x redirect from the old RSS feed to the new one. This requires the specific permission of the original owner of the podcast. This acts as an identity check. Therefore:

• Do not allow any monetisation to take place until a redirect has been confirmed. Dynamically inserted audio is fine for testing; but no money may be made by publisher or host until a redirect has been confirmed.
• Do not allow one-click distribution to Apple/Spotify/etc until a redirect has been confirmed. (Ideally, your UX should stop a duplicate submission to these directories).

Redirects are normally possible from all reputable podcast hosts. However, where a redirect is not possible, a 404 error (the original feed going away) may also be acceptable.

Signatories

After contacting them, Podnews has had commitments from the following podcast hosting companies that they will follow this Code of Practice:

• Spreaker
• RedCircle
• RSS.com
• Transistor

We would be keen to hear from other podcast hosting companies who wish to demonstrate their respect to creators.