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E-book Saving New Sounds : Podcast Preservation and Historiography

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Penilaian

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In March 2014, podcaster and comedian Adam Carolla initiated a crowd-funding campaign designed to “save” podcasting. A company called Per-sonal Audio LLC was suing Carolla for infringing on a patent—a “system for disseminating media content in serialized episodes” (Nazer 2018)—that it claimed gave the company exclusive rights over the very practice of distributing audio via a podcast. Carolla’s campaign called on podcast listeners and podcast creators to band together to offset the legal fees it would cost to pursue the case, a case that would save podcasting by ensuring it remained a practice anyone could do rather than become a licensable technology exclusive to one company. In the end, Carolla raised close to half a million dollars from over twelve thousand support-ers, and his cause was featured in dozens of podcasts and hundreds of other media outlets. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—a non-profit digital rights group that promotes internet civil liberties—also began challenging the patent through the patent office, in support of Carolla and other podcasters. Although Carolla was the highest-profile podcaster at the center of the infringement suit, with many other pod-casters out there and millions of avid listeners who regularly download and use podcasts, the threat that Personal Audio might go after a much wider swath of podcast producers was enough to galvanize a disparate community of listeners, users, media producers, and tech activists. Through the EFF’s work, the overly broad claims related to the patent were invalidated in 2018 (Nazer 2018). Yet the dispute highlights how fragile new media formats can be and how vulnerable new industries are when the protocols, norms, and conventions of production, circulation, and consumption have yet to settle (Gitelman 2006).As we write this in 2020, podcasting has moved past the existen-tial threat of a patent troll. By many measurements, the medium is flourishing—with the quantity of podcasts, listeners, advertising reve-nue, and nonprofit funding increasing sharply year after year, including an “explosive” 2018, which saw the number of US people over the age of twelve who have ever listened to a podcast climb above 50 percent for the first time (Edison Research 2019; Podnews 2019). While it’s tempting to conclude that podcasting has been “saved,” there are many other related issues and threats that demand attention. The challenges span the tech-nical and the cultural, the mundane and the complex. Podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, like iTunes,1 that are difficult to search with any rigor. Many podcasts get put behind paywalls as they get popular or as back catalogs become a potential source of revenue. Then there’s the precariousness of the very platforms that help make up podcasting’s diffuse and some-times DIY infrastructure. All it took was a minor change in Dropbox’s features and terms of service for a number of podcasts to disappear from their regular feeds (Morris 2017; Dropbox 2017), while other platforms have their own intricacies about how much content they’ll keep and for how long.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

791.44 HOY s

Penerbit

USA : University of Michigan Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

287 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780472901241

Klasifikasi

791.44

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

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Edisi

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Subjek

Radio Show

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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