Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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).
Where do people get the idea that apple invented podcasting?
The name?
Property is theft.