After EFF Effort, Infamous "Podcasting Patent" Invalidated

Ars Technica reports some good news on the YRO front. An excerpt: A year-and-a-half after the Electronic Frontier Foundation created a crowd-funded challenge to a patent being used to threaten podcasters, the patent has been invalidated. In late 2013, after small podcasters started getting threat letters from Personal Audio LLC, the EFF filed what's called an "inter partes review," or IPR, which allows anyone to challenge a patent at the US Patent and Trademark Office. The order issued today by the USPTO lays to rest the idea that Personal Audio or its founder, Jim Logan, are owed any money by podcasters because of US Patent No. 8,112,504, which describes a "system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence." The article points out, though, that the EFF warns Personal Audio LLC is seeking more patents on podcasting. Mentioned within: Adam Carolla's fight against these patents and our Q&A with Jim Logan.

Comments

What the hell is going on a the USPTO?

[Yaotzin]

I believe some patent rights are necessary to promote innovation, but when you start handing out patents like a paedophile hands out candy, the opposite effect is achieved.

Re:What the hell is going on a the USPTO?

[Rob Y.]

That doesn't sound like a hardware patent either. More like a 'process' patent - which is essentially the same thing as a software patent, and shouldn't be allowed - at least in trivial cases like the one you cite.

Re:What the hell is going on a the USPTO?

[Dutch Gun]

If you make that clever algorithm public and document it, you could be protecting yourself and others from being locked out of it by later patent trolls. It's called "prior art."

We very often do. I'm a videogame programmer, and a lot of us share knowledge at developer conferences, articles, blogs, and classroom lectures with the blessing of our companies. There's actually a healthy trend of knowledge sharing in this industry, and many people are surprised to find out that very few videogame companies bother with patents at all.

In a little under two decades in the industry, I've only had TWO experiences with patents: Having to pay to use mp3-encoded files in our game, and being sued by a patent troll. Given this, you can probably understand why I'm not all that enthusiastic about software patents. For the most part, I believe that most companies would rather focus on creating new, innovative products instead of desperately trying to leverage some patented advantage. There's nothing about our products that isn't perfectly well protected by copyright and trademark law.

Thanks, EFF!

[Nemyst]

And remember, the EFF is a non-profit. Donate if you can, show your appreciation. They're fighting the good fight.

Re:What else is driving this

[neilo_1701D]

My brother works for the Australian Patent Office, so I've no idea how much of this translates to the USPTO. I asked him this very question a few years ago.

When a patent application comes in, the initial examiner is the newest, most lowly graded person in the office with a huge caseload. They, to a degree, depend on the submitter to have taken the steps to validate the uniqueness of the patent; however there is research done as well to validate the submission.

Most submissions are done by patent lawyers with as much obfuscation as possible, and if it's outside of the examiner's area is much more likely to get through, as the examiner has to try and decipher what is going on. If the submitter claims no prior art and words the submission carefully enough, it's likely to get through.

With an appear, it goes much higher up the chain and diverts to someone with more specialized knowledge for further assessment. As you can probably guess, it takes longer and costs much more to get this review happening.

So, there are fundamental problems with the process in that it assumes honesty on the part of the submitter. If they set out to deceive, as Personal Audio seems to have done, it's a long and costly process to undo it.