

VoloMedia Awarded the “Patent for Podcasting” - amelim
http://newteevee.com/2009/07/29/volomedia-awarded-the-patent-for-podcasting/

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DanielStraight
Further proof that patent decisions are made by people who have not had
meaningful contact with the world for several hundred years.

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jprobitaille
I'm not sure that the indep claim covers the way podcasts are delivered
nowadays. Claim 1 seems to require a single channel which both provides
notification of new content and from which new content is downloaded. But, an
RSS feed for a podcast just provides a URL pointing to the content. No one
really downloads anything from an RSS feed.

My guess is that if this patent reads on any technology in use now, it's
probably something more like dvrs or on demand TV.

Caveat: I haven't read the specification, so it's possible that there's a
special definition that I'm missing.

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tl
"VoloMedia, which used be called Podbridge, filed for this particular patent
in November 2003 — a time, Navar said, before it was obvious that people would
download episodic content such as podcasts."

Ok, now 2003 still a little late to the game as far as I'm concerned, but 5.5
years to award a patent? Whether or not patents are a good thing, the patent
office and the tech industry cannot work together with such long lead times.

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radley
oh please...

<http://www.princeton.edu/newmedia/podcast/2002.xml>

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dctoedt
@radley, this is interesting, given that the effective filing date of the
patent was in November 2003. If this was a January 2002 podcast, it would come
under Section 102(b) of the patent statute, which says: "A person shall be
entitled to a patent unless - ... (b) the invention was patented or described
in a printed publication in this or a foreign country ___or in public use_
__or on sale in this country, __ _more than one year prior to the date of the
application for patent_ __in the United States ...."

And section 103(a) says: "(a) A patent may not be obtained though the
invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section
102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be
patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would
have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having
ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. ..."

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jprobitaille
The problem that I can see with this document is that there's no clear
indication of when this document was first made available to the public.

I get that the lectures were published in '02, but what's at issue is when
this particular page was published. As far as I can tell, the only thing that
dates this document particularly is the lastBuildDate in '06.

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speek
I would argue that the term Podcasting has already been genericized.

