Triton Digital's Spreaker commits to fighting unauthorized podcast copies

This is an email from John Rosso, President and CEO, Triton Digital, the owners of Spreaker. It follows our investigation into copied podcasts.

Protecting and serving creators is a top priority for us. Unauthorized publishing and monetization of content is not permitted on our platform as outlined in our Terms of Service, and we agree this is an important issue for the industry to address. We have policies and practices in place to protect against misuse of our platform, and we act promptly on notices from rights holders, including removing unauthorized feeds.

Duplicate feeds represent a small fraction of the podcasts hosted on our platform and not all duplicate feeds are unauthorized copies, determining the difference requires case-by-case review. Many of those duplicates are authorized and reflect legitimate uses of podcasting’s open RSS ecosystem including shows being actively transferred, shows with a secondary feed for alternative ad loads, or shows that are re-published on the Spreaker hosting platform (as hosting on Spreaker is a requirement for appearing in the Spreaker web and mobile player).

However, we do recognize that a limited number are unauthorized copies, and as a leader in the space and as part of our ongoing efforts to protect creators, we are implementing the following additional safeguards: 

• Reinforcing our rules: every new publisher already has to agree to our terms of service. We’ll add extra reminders of our Community Rules and Terms & Conditions along the sign-up path and in our monetization emails.

• Notifying feed owners: when a feed is imported to Spreaker, we’ll email the owner listed on the original feed, giving them a chance to alert us to any unauthorized activity.

• Checking for existing feeds: before publication, we’ll use the Apple and Podcast Index Publisher APIs to check whether a feed already exists elsewhere.

• Additional review before monetization: We have a team that signs off on every podcast before it can be monetized. Any feed flagged as a possible duplicate will now need an additional approval step, including looking for a valid redirect, before it’s eligible for monetization.

We’re targeting to have these changes in place by year’s end. Sooner when possible.

As you noted, Spreaker respects the <podcast:locked> tag, and we plan to support it on the publishing side of the platform in the future as well.

In addition, recognizing that this is an industry-wide issue, we support broader industry efforts to establish best practices such as your concept of a Code of Practice for ingesting podcast feeds from other hosting companies, and encourage other hosting platforms to support it.

Thanks again for raising this issue, and for the opportunity to respond.