Understanding that US courts have held "interactive computer services" such as AOL and forums blameless for content published by third parties, the question at hand is how that law applies to podcasts.
In essence, interactive computer services - which is largely defined as services who do not actually create content - aren't held liable for content on their site even though the services have traditional editorial control over what is published. There are two issues at stake here that might differentiate a podcast from a written article:
If the podcast in question contains an interview, was the content of that interview positively created by the podcaster by virtue of steering the questions or provoking a certain response? If found to be so, the courts may rule that the content is not "third party" content and is, in fact, content produced by the interviewer/podcaster.
In the event that previously published information becomes known to be false, it is widely recognized that it is all but impossible to retract a published article, is it equally impossible to pull a show from the archives?
There have been no clear decisions on these issues as of yet because podcasting is relatively new and has yet to stand the baptism of fire that mainstream media has lived through, but at the very least there is food for thought there.
There's an awful lot more in this aticle than I've touched on here and even if you're not a US podcaster, it might bear reading just to get a leg up on what you might or might not want to do.
Me? I'm a moderate. I like podcasting, not fighting legal battles or trying to convince my friends to smuggle a laptop complete with microphone and a copy of Audacity into my cell in the middle of a cake.
