He explains the situation, which he describes as the “tinfoil hat moment” this way:”We pull all the info in from the original RSS feed, the podcast feed if you will, and… you have to have a local copy. Because the reliability of external feeds is just not that high. When we have the information, you want to hold onto that info for at least 15 minutes or until it‚Äôs requested again, so we can do all kinds of stuff with it, like simple ways to add it to channels, to share it with people‚Ķ

“We basically cache that, no different from what iTunes does.

“You go searching for a show, and you find a couple ways to play the show: click Play and it‚Äôll fire up our mash board (a way to play episode and look at whole feed or channel); also we are transcoding the feed, we give you a way to play it in Windows Media Player, winamp, Real Player, we also give you an XML button which means ‘here‚Äôs the raw data’…

“Those 4 or 5 buttons are next to each other, and underneath there‚Äôs a ‚ÄúPlay‚Äù button on our mash board. All of those work on this internal copy we have, the most recent copy of the show‚Ķ which is the only way we can reliably produce a good experience for someone who wants to just listen to the show.

“What should have happened was that the link underneath the orange on white XML button‚Ķ should be a direct link to the original, with original information, no added bits from us, original copyrights etc.,‚Ķ. Instead of linking to the external feed, it went to the internal feed ”

“It wasn‚Äôt a bug, it was a dumb mistake, it slipped through.”

“What was interesting, was that a number of people in the podcast community immediately said ‚Äúyou‚Äôre thieves, you‚Äôre stealing, stripping out copyright‚Äù ‚Äì we‚Äôre not stealing out copyright, it‚Äôs just an internal feed ‚Äì it has different information — it‚Äôs not your original feed ‚Äì if we were going to republish that as your feed, it would be completely wrong.

“It was just as I said on my weblog, just a mistake.””

“Only a few people, it was nice to see, they said, ‘Maybe this is just an honest mistake.’ And that‚Äôs where you see what people are really made of.”

“When they come out and say, ‘this is not unintentional, curry is way too smart for this. Since they couldn‚Äôt steal our content with contracts, they‚Äôll doing it with our feeds’.”

“It was hard to fix this–this code hits five different places, and you have to be careful fixing things in a live environment.. it was a relatively simple change to link back to the original feed, and with that, it all kind of went away.”

“But, Boy ! did I learn something about a few people.”