Sticher said:

Stitcher is your source for portable and personalized news and talk internet radio. From business to tech news, from politics to comedy, we “stitch” the content you want into personalized, always-current stations that you can easily listen to on your iPhone, Android or desktop. Each day, the latest segments stream to you automatically, without you having to manually refresh anything. Stitcher puts the world of talk radio at your fingertips anywhere, anytime, on the go.'

Yeah, fuck them. I just thought the email was spam and totally ignored it.

The email said they had a change of policy that required the consent of the creators. Maybe it was a lawyer thing.

This is pretty common. I get emails like that all the time but usually it's them requesting it (for free), not having already put it on their site. Whatever. There's nothing you can do to STOP these people. I do kind of want to write them a bitchy email mostly so I can include the line "I want to thank you so much for your passive-agressive note." But it's really too much work. I'd already forgotten about it until I saw this thread this morning.

No, they download a copy of your mp3 and host it on their server, behind their ads, so you don't get the hits at all.

Congratulations, you just invented the battle over CSS aggregating webcomics. ( I mean, not that it's a fight we shouldn't have, it's just that it's been had before. )

It's not that they add commercials to the MP3, it's that their website and app show commercials, thus earning them sponsor money.

Retraction- The actual podcast is not available. Just an automated message saying "No longer available, talk to the producers of said podcast and ask them not to be ass hats to us yo". Kinda insulting if you ask me...

I hope it is.

Oh, by the way, the way that "content providers" can monetize Stitcher using their stuff is if they apply for a partnership and then get new users to download the Stitcher app. Fuuuuuuuuck that.

Why's that?

"The fact of the matter is that is me, Dave, and Jeremy aren't profiting by producing these podcasts and Stitcher was leaching off of them (who knows for how long) and earning advertising money in the process."

Exactly what gives you the right to declare that "leeching"? Why is it wrong for them to earn advertising money?

Note that I agree that both of these things are true. What I want is for you to explain how they are true without IP rights and IP protection.

"You're totally wrong but I don't want to talk about it but you're wrong okay? But I don't want to talk about it."

its wrong for them to misrepresent their service and profit through negligence and lies. Other podcasts i listen to partnered with stitcher on the the condition that their own feeds would be used for the downloads and were not informed that separate advertising would be run during their podcasts. If they want to be a podcast aggregator and run ads on the site that links to the podcast feeds thats fine. But its not okay to run others content ignoring their specific conditions as a money trap.

I don't think it's selling out. That's a word people throw away too much. What they are doing is creating an artificial revenue stream by convincing content producers that this is the only way they can get paid for what they make (by shilling for some asshole site). That's really insidious. I think it's annoying that people make these asinine business models that are, in essence, rent seeking from people who don't really have the legal expertise/social clout to stop you. That sucks. It's a bad part of the internet.

But the reality of the internet is that's always going to exist. People have to accept that. Companies, especially, have to accept that old business models don't work anymore. Instead of running around like chicken little and proposing stuff like SOPA they should be doing what all those libertarian, Adam Smith invisible hand people are always puffing their chest out about and let the market decide what it wants. The market doesn't want $4 TV episodes on iTunes. That's an artificial model. The market doesn't want to pay $120 for cable every month. But they keep trying to force them to by enacting super strict legislation instead of trying to shackle people to the old ways. We don't buy DVDs anymore, but we sure as shit watched a whole season of True Blood on Amazon for 99 cents a pop because it was easier than pirating it. We did the same with Harry Potter movies for $4 each. The market is still there, stifling them with laws like SOPA isn't the way to get at them.

My concern from the start with SOPA isn't that I won't be able to watch all of Die Hard in 17 parts on youtube, or even that I won't be able to google a Kelly Clarkson song I want to listen to and click on the first youtube link I find. It's that, if the penalties for violating the law are so crazy strict that you can shut down a website without due process if you even smell the hint of piracy in the air then sites like Youtube and Twitter aren't going to comply, they're probably just going to go away entirely and with them goes the enormous good done by easy access to social media. Maybe they'd get replaced by something else or maybe everyone would just get too scared and we'd lose the aggregator and we'd go back to searching for fenslerfilms.com every time we wanted to show our friends a GI Joe ad. It sounds hyperbolic, it's a worst case scenario, but it's one I would avoid at all costs, especially costs derived from the behest of the companies. These laws are not to protect artists they are to protect corporations. The original intent of copyright law was to give you a comparatively short window of exclusivity, not give corporations strangleholds on their products in perpetuity. Remix culture is an absurdly important and criminally underestimated part of the creative sphere. I would be very sad to see it go. That's what SOPA represents.

I have the same problem with Stitcher that I do with the rationalizations that go along with piracy: everyone "steals" to some extent. It's the assumption that you deserve it that bothers me. If you google "fast karate" you will find a dozen sites like Stitcher. They have been around since we started the podcast and they rotate in an out of existence on the reg. All of their business models are artificial. I have never concerned myself with them, because that's just part of the reality of the internet. The only reason Stitcher bothered me is because of their passive-aggressive email about how we were rejecting a great opportunity. The only reason I remember Stitcher exists now, three days later, is because of this thread. This piracy stuff, you can't let it get to you. Sites like Good Old Games and people making The Witcher aren't going out of business even though they don't use DRM. They say "fuck yeah piracy sucks, but you can't beat it throwing a hissy fit." It doesn't outweigh the huge positive good of all this content being freely available. So let them "steal" my stuff. They'll be gone in a year.

Here is my metaphor:

The internet is like if someone said "you can have the best meal of your life 999 days out of 1000, but on the 1000th day you have to eat dog shit."

Now the people who propose SOPA are saying "Fuck no. We don't want to eat dog shit ever. Also, if everyone is eating well all the time there's going to be less food for us. We are going to impose a ban on all food ever so we don't have to eat shit occasionally."

Then the whole world starves.

They want to erase all the good just so they can amortize that tiny bit of bad. That sucks. The internet is so awesome and does so many awesome things. If the price I have to pay for that is someone "stealing" something I made and making a statistically insignificant amount of money off of it before they go out of business because they were shilling a product nobody really wanted then they can have it. It won't bother me one bit.

I totally agree with both Dave and Paul in this regard. Yes, someone will swipe your shit from time to time and has, but this "zomg you better play our fucking game" shit is insulting and weird. Gimme a break. You're not doing podcasters a favor by swiping their shit and offering you crumbs for it. They are putting up zero effort and acting like they are somehow doing you a favor. If we were selling ad space (and actually, DAP technically is as part of CollectionDX, by the way) our advertisers would be pissed at these other clowns serving there ads.

The problem is, though, if you haven't been putting up copyright notifications (and I know Dave and I haven't) then it's possible our work might be technically public domain as soon as we publish it. Which I'm not actually opposed to; I just chafe at the idea of someone else making money off of my effort.

Dave, that's true, but once you start distributing it, I think a whole new set of rules applies. For example, Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain because the company that distributed it altered the original opening credit crawl with the copyright information on it. Without that information, the film passed into the public domain immediately. I'm not sure how this applies to podcasts. Some that I've listened to do include copyright announcements...

I have never heard of BeyondPod. Time to investigate.

EDIT: It seems like this is just an app reading our RSS feed, which is totally fine. What's not fine is taking our MP3s and hosting them elsewhere.

Reading is fundamental: "I really think there needs to be some kind of legitimate podcast subscription service like iTunes for Droids". Androids can't run iTunes.

He said, "I wish I could use iTunes on my Android" and you went, "I like to use iTunes, you are a hater for not using iTunes". That makes no sense.

Because you said it immediately after he said that and no one was hating on iTunes?

dumb

karaokeninja said:

That makes no sense.

I've got yer "good taste" RIGHT HERE.

I know we ran with it in typical forum fashion but Nick, you seriously need to knock it the fuck off. It wasn't ever cute and now you're just being a super fucking dick. Don't even think about playing it innocent with "whaaaat? I was just XYZ" You're being deliberately obtuse for no damned reason.

BeyondPod/AmazonMP3 is probably the closest you'll get to an iTunes like experience on Android any time soon. That market is too splintered, unlike Apple's iron grip. That said BeyondPod is a pretty decent RSS podcast catcher, it has its flaws but I've found none better.