Last week, SplashCast released a product called “MyPodcastNetwork” that allows anyone to effectively remix podcasts via RSS in a browser-based media player. The original podcasts are transcoded into Flash to allow for immediate playback.

Some hailed the player as a great innovation, others as the height of piracy. Marshall Kirckpatrick responded with refactors aimed at making the attribution and source more obvious, ensuring that hit counts are passed back to the content provider, and so on.

The real nut to crack, however, isn’t whether or not such a product can be designed to please everyone, but whether the product can leverage a machine-to-machine opt-out mechanism. (As it stands, you have to contact SplashCast to be removed from the list of transcode-able podcasts.)

What RSS and Atom need is a means to examine the copyright and distribution statement within the RSS feed itself. The copyright element in the feed doesn’t help, because it is free-form. It may contain a name, or a name and a year, or “All rights reserved” or “All your base belong to us.” It simply isn’t usable at a semantic level.

The Currency of Counts

The next logical step would be to reach for a Creative Commons license. But when it comes to rich media, what is really covered therein? Does “distribution” include offline media like, say, a DVD compilation or a classroom handout? (As it stands, yes.) What about transcoding and re-hosting, like what SplashCast does? Does transcoding count as “modification” or “derivative”? Creative Commons licenses are too course-grained; They simply don’t delve deep enough into the particulars that people need.

For most podcasters, the real asset to protect isn’t the media file, but the hit counts on that media. They need to know how many subscribers they have. For much of the podcasting world, popularity is the only payout. If their media is copied and rehosted elsewhere, they instantly lose touch with their audience.

Although the SplashCast debate is fresh, the inadequacies of Creative Commons is not. This discussion from 2005 ran up against the same problem: Allowing other to distribute your media without fine-grained guidelines can be prohibitive.

A Need for Podcaster Digital Rights

Simply adding an enclosure to RSS isn’t enough for podcasting in today’s world. We need a standards-based approach to fine-grained, a-la-cart licensing and distribution rights management. It needs to have semantic meaning so parsers and readers can understand it. It needs to cover all of the aspects of Creative Commons, and then some:

• Hit-count reporting
• Rehosting
• Remixing
• Offline distribution
• Transcoding
• Modification to length
• Modification to quality
• Modification to content
• Removal of advertising
• … and so on.

The delicious irony of the situation is this: While the public is decrying traditional media for using Digital Rights Management, the new media is suddenly discovering a need for it.