Podkey creator denies he hijacked' feed

As George Lambert, creator of Podkey, points out in his comment to my post yesterday about an eWeek story regarding the "hijacking" of Erik Marcus' podcast feed, eWeek later followed up with Lambert's version of the story.

Lambert told eWeek that Marcus had registered with his service to begin with and the "ransom" represented fees that would be required to do the custom coding the podcaster has demanded. eWeek quotes Lambert:

"He wanted me to make sure no other directory services got the information from me, but I can't tell who are directory services, because we're not submitting anything. People are coming to look at our list. I have a choice: I remove it from anywhere or I [don't] remove it. You can't restrict who comes to look at your podcast. So his request wasn't technically practical.

"If you want me to come up with a solution, I can try, but that's consulting. That doesn't fall within the bounds of a free service—one that's there to make people's lives better. Is that extortion? I met his [original] request immediately and without reservation. I said I'd reinstate it for free if he met my terms. If you're asking me to do something custom, you have to pay me to do [it]. That's not unreasonable, and that's not extortion."

See Lambert's blog for more on this, including e-mails between him and Marcus.