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Company Awarded "The Patent For Podcasting"
Chris Albrecht writes "VoloMedia announced today that it has been awarded what it called the 'patent for podcasting.' According to the press announcement, patent number 7,568,213, titled 'Method for Providing Episodic Media,' covers:
'...the fundamental mechanisms of podcasting, including providing consumer subscription to a show, automatically downloading media to a computer, prioritizing downloads, providing users with status indication, deleting episodes, and synchronizing episodes to a portable media device.'"
There is nothing in this that even approaches the reality that anyone except an IP lawyer works in. FFS.
When you don't have the means to distribute "large" media, nor the means to easily consume that media, then there is no place for podcasting. Once you have those means, however, "providing consumer subscription to a show, automatically downloading media to a computer, prioritizing downloads, providing users with status indication, deleting episodes, and synchronizing episodes to a portable media device" are all just obvious extensions to how people will obtain their media.
One convenient locations...in Africa.
Seriously, is it ever possible to not patent every single fart that you think of?
[ irc.p2p-network.net -> #zomgwtfbbq ][ http://zomgwtfbbq.info ]
Isn't the 'pod' in podcasting from the iPod (or really the iTunes mechanism for downloading things to the iPod)? Does this not imply prior art in and of itself?
for making me click through to get to the actual patent. Anyway, from reading some of the patent, it looks like they were trying to patent something at least somewhat interesting and unique. However, claim 1--the only independent claim--pretty clearly covers iTunes, among other prior art. I am not sure if it was bad drafting or bad intent, but I would not bring this to Apple's attention if I were the company. I've read some patent applications were the value added was miniscule, and the only way to see it is to look at some of the prosecution history. Maybe that's the case here, but I am too lazy to dig through the history. With a filing date of 2003, I doubt this will survive much scrutiny. That sucks if this company was trying to do something interesting. That's great if they are trolling.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
the other 194 countries who do not recognize US patents its probably a good thing, nothing like a government eliminating its own companies from the worlds competition.
iam more interested in the patenting "end game" in the US, with every year as more of their IP gets locked up it will come to a point where its just not possible to do business at all in the US without infringing a patent or 3 and so simply it will be better and more profitable for companies to do business and innovate outside of the USA
leaving the US sitting in court with its millions of lawyers jerking each other off while the ROTW just gets on with business as usual, what exactly is the end game ? and what happens when you get there ?
what i do know is 3 billion Chinese and 1.4 billion Indians not to mention Europe should take up the slack quite nicely in the future (hint: they already are, seen your universities students country of origin makeup recently? they are taking all that knowledge right back to their own countries).
it will take several lawsuits costing millions before the patent is examined. And I doubt if there anything non-obvious here. Say, didn't the USPTO review their guidelines with respect to KSR and Bilski?
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
This emphasizes just how rotten to the core is our patent system. Software patents are asinine. Patents on life are even worse. The whole system should be dumped.
Audioblogging
The RSS Enclosure element was added in 2001 and was used by Radiobloggers.
Just because they didn't call themselves podcasters, doesn't disqualify it as prior art.
It's a pretty obvious desire to copy Audio to a portable device, just like it's an obvious desire to copy Ebooks, Electronic newsletters, Newsgroup postings, or E-mail messages to a mobile device for consumption.
And the method in which Podcast clients were designed to work is pretty obvious, once you define the need: Newsreader for an audio blog.
And old item deletion (good disk space management), were more obvious then than they are now -- disk space used to be more expensive, managing it efficiently would be essential for any application that deals with large files.
Claim 1 is:
Drop any element and you avoid this patent. For instant, just add a download confirmation step, and you're golden (thereby avoiding the "automatic download occurring without further user interaction")
Where do people get the idea that apple invented podcasting?
The name?
Property is theft.
I most definitely do not want the USPTO in charge of my health care. It's a good thing we can judge a whole by any of its parts, or else racism wouldn't work, now would it?
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Thank Dawkins! Finally, someone who gets substantive patent law on Slashdot!
Really, there should be a page we can point people to who misunderstand the concepts of novelty, inventive step, and scope of protection...
The question was where people get the idea that Apple invented podcasting.
GP's answer -- "the name" -- is the correct answer. That is where people get the idea. In fact the answer is so obvious that the quesiton was foolish. (To be fair, the question was almost certainly rhetorical; that doesn't make it any less foolish. GGP could've spoken more effectively by simply saying 'Apple did not invent podcasting', as others have.)
And yet people jump on GP with all the reasons that the name is not an indicator of who invented the technology, as though that were somehow an argument against what GP said.