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Patent disputes between (usually) rival companies are pretty much ten-a-penny in the world of technology, but news that a California-based business is claiming it holds the patent for podcasting might result in a few cocked industry eyebrows.
Podcasting patent disputes on the horizon? Image: curtis.kennington/Flickr.
Specifically, VoloMedia was this week granted a patent covering a “method for providing episodic media content,” which the company has duly interpreted as meaning it holds the “US patent for podcasting.”
Writing in an official blog post, VoloMedia founder Murgesh Navar said his company had been working on podcasting for a number of years prior to the technology’s popular appearance and that the initial patent application was filed in November of 2003, a full year before podcasting took off.
“This helps underscore the point, that for six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media,” explained Navar.
“Today, podcasting is 100 percent RSS-based. However, the [VoloMedia] patent is not RSS-dependent,” he outlined. “Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads. It just happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.”
Essentially, the controversial patent appears to suggest that any media provider offering online episodic content, whether it be in the form of an audio/visual podcast or a television show download, must first carve out a licensing deal with VoloMedia.
The patent, while likely to go down like a lead balloon within the media industry, has already resulted in a pointed response from Berkeley-based technologist Dave Winer, who’s widely recognised as having played a significant role in the creation of the very first podcast.
“I’m certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law, but it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired [VoloMedia’s] ‘invention,’” said Winer through his official Scripting News blog. “It certainly predates it.”
“Throughout 2001 we did trials and experiments to learn how the protocol worked in practice. Radio UserLand, shipped in Jan 2002, was both a podcast distributor and a podcast client,” he explained
“By July 2003, I had helped Chris Lydon boot up his series of podcast interviews with the new bloggers of the day… All that happened before VoloMedia filed their patent application. Or so it seems.”
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