Thursday, July 30, 2009

Podcasting Patented!

Ars Technica walks through the latest stupid patent award. Podcasting patented! VoloMedia claims major tech patent

"Hold onto your iPhones—a company called VoloMedia was yesterday granted a patent on a "method for providing episodic media content." Or, as the company puts it in today's announcement, VoloMedia now owns the "US patent for podcasting."

"The patent in question "was filed in November 2003, almost a year before the start of podcasting. This helps underscore the point, that for nearly six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media... Today, podcasting is 100 percent RSS-based. However, the patent is not RSS-dependent. Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads. It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.""

Dave Winer provides some prior art of the work he did with Adam Curry in 2001. That's what I remember as the first podcast, or episodic media (in this case audio) download.

And, doesn't a six year lead time in processing a patent application seriously impede its usefulness?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lawyers will make the most money off of this patent.