A company called Volomedia just got the US Patent Office to grant them exclusive rights to patent podcasting. Say what? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting, and is putting out a call for help for all the O.G. podcasters out there. Paging Dave Winer and Adam Curry! Snip:
The Volomedia patent covers "a method for providing episodic media." It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years. Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners. Right now, just about anyone can create their own on-demand talk radio program, earning an audience on the strength of their ideas. But more costs and hassle means that podcasting could go the way of mainstream radio -- with only the big guys able to afford an audience. And we'd have a bogus patent to blame.EFF Tackles Bogus Podcasting Patent - And We Need Your Help (thanks Peter Kirn)In order to bust this patent, we are looking for additional "prior art" -- or evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use before November 19, 2003. In particular, we're looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes. You can read the entire prior art request here, and if you have something that could help, please send it to podcasting_priorart@eff.org or fill out the form on our Volomedia page.
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They'll have a patent?
They'll be able to cry in their beers with the RIAA in a few years over enforcement.
Reminds me of the douche who patented beans farmers had been using for hundreds of years and now makes enough money off the patent to fund all his legal costs as people challenge the patent.
What about quicktime? Didn't they have channels you could "subscribe" to or follow?
Kind of makes you wonder if the people at the patent office really go over these patents.
Wouldn't "a method for providing episodic media" be covered by television and radio already, since those have been around for a lot longer than podcasting.
Also, didn't Apple try to patent podcasting at one time since it was all about the iPod originally? Or was that just a lawsuit to get people to stop calling it podcasting?
Ignoring for now that this patent may be too broad, if Volomedia were actually the first to create a method to deliver "episodic media", why should they not be able to patent it?
Tough sh!t-- I already patented all written language, so even Boingboings complaining about it with written words is in violation of my patent.
bobbytables#2: who said anything about not being able to patent?
Here is Dave Winer posting about this with a proof of concept XML files with MP3 enclosures from January 2001.
http://www.thetwowayweb.com/payloadsForRss
I was waiting for the first unpaid industry lobbyist. They're getting to be very common in this type of thread. Always give companies engaged in highly dubious business practices the benefit of the doubt, and always assume bad faith on the part of the consumer or smaller businesses.
Blech.
What's the patentable difference between a Podcast and being on a mailing list that sends you e-mails with audio attachments?
Actually, the patent has already been granted in the end of july. Ars Technica ran an article about this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/podcasting-patented-after-2003-application-approved-by-uspto.ars
#2: I'll just take the liberty of citating some sentences from the article: "While Navar says that the company has been around for "nearly six years," the company was actually founded in 2005, but took over IP from Serenade Systems—another company founded by Navar back in 2002.
[...]
As for the patent application, it says that it was filed in 2008—but it serves as a continuance to a 2003 patent. Such procedural moves can keep patent applications alive for years, though this can lead to obvious problems as applicants try to game the system by changing a patent's language over time to better describe whatever is currently hot in the marketplace."
Now I am not going to say that those patents were filed in bad faith, but when a company that describes itself primarily as a "provider of "digital market analysis" and "advertising solutions" files very broad patents (there have been 11 other currently unknown patents filed by the same company), well, this sets quite some alarm bells ringing with me. It's hard to look at this and not see a parasite trying to cash in on the earnings other companies made with actual products and services.
I'm going to apply for a patent on "stupid" so companies like this will be forced to pay me royalties.
Oh noes! Someone asked a question instead of instantly throwing flaming bags of poo on Volomedia. They must be a lobbyist!
Thanks for the extra info denkbert. Does look fishy.
Actually I wanted to use the phrase "unpaid whore" to get the full sarcastic sense of my perception across, but aside from having no desire to insult whores- who in fact hurt no one (unless they pay extra I guess)- I figured that would be flaming and settled on "lobbyist". Don't pull that "ask a question" crap. You're making a rhetorical statement with a question mark on the end of it. If it is a tried and true honest question- it's a stupid question, and you got a stupid answer.
Here's how it's a stupid question:
"If Volomedia were actually the first to create a method to deliver "episodic media", why should they not be able to patent it?"
"But, they didn't."
"If Volomedia were actually the first to create a method to deliver "episodic media", why should they not be able to patent it?"
"But, they didn't."
"If Volomedia were actually the first to create a method to deliver "episodic media", why should they not be able to patent it?"
"But, they didn't."
Repeat until you get the damn point.
Denkbert's comment left me more informed. Your comments leave me confused at your anger issues (or is that supposed to be wit?). Oops, there I go again with the rhetorical statements...
yeah, bobby, all you just proved there is that your douchebag IS bigger than his.
if Volomedia were actually the first to create a method to deliver "episodic media", why should they not be able to patent it?
Under those false circumstances, your false premise is plausible.
Hardly think my rebuttal made me a larger douchebag. I will defend myself when someone pounces on me. Whatever, defending myself goes way off topic on this thread.
The intent of my question was to gauge people's thoughts on valid patents that cover seemingly ubiquitous technology. Based on the little I knew of the story, I wondered if people just didn't want give up something they considered public domain. I got a couple good answers to that question so now I know that is not the case.
I think I will just lurk a lot longer next time.
I'll actually reply to your counterfactual hypothetical. If they really did come up with it, no they still should not be able to patent it.
Why? Because they haven't innovated anything. There are many, many ideas out there that basically take something perfectly ordinary, tack "ON A COMPUTER" on the end, and suddenly the person who did the tacking thinks he is owed a monopoly on it.
That's the problem with business method patents in general. They essentially describe doing something, rather than describing a mechanism for getting it done.
Had Amazon patented "publishing a book ON A COMPUTER" there would be no competitors to the Kindle, which would only be bad for consumer choice.
My rule of thumb: If you can describe something you want a computer to do (such as "deliver episodic media content"), and any talented CS grad can sketch out the fundamentals of the idea in twenty minutes, and have a working demo of it within a week, you have no business patenting it.
Surely Usenet binaries would count? It supported binaries, newsgroups are channels, you can subscribe to them or unsubscribe from them, news programs provide tools for managing space, it can support episodic media in the sense that people can post material whenever they like. It even has a two-level subscription and management system - the news protocols for news servers to exchange articles, and the nntp protocol for clients that don't want to manage a whole news system to be able to access news from a server (but the server-to-server protocols are more likely to count here.)
I don't know when people start posting MP3s, but it's probably not hard to find out.
And there's certainly good documentation about the distribution and space management systems and the media formats.
It sounds like a patent on RSS to me. Wikipedia talks about it going back to 1999.