Volomedia claims podcast patent

Scepticism over US company Volomedia’s claim that it patented podcasting in November 2003

Claims by a US company, Volomedia (formerly known as “Podbridge”), is to have patented podcasting in November 2003 - “almost a full year before podcasting began” - have been greeted with scepticism by technologists, and particularly by one of the people who arguably did so in 2001.

Dave Winer responded on his blog that

it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired their “invention.” It certainly predates it.

Winer adds that by July 2003 “I had helped Chris Lydon boot up boot up his series of podcast interviews with the new bloggers of the day” – and points out that this predates Volomedia’s claimed filing.

Volomedia is claiming that its U.S. Patent 7,568,213 covers “all episodic media downloads” – not just podcasts that depend on RSS, as almost all of those around today do.

Volomedia’s landgrabbing claim has echoes of that by BT, which once claimed to have a patent on hyperlinks. Had it been able to make its assertion stand up, then it could have claimed a licensing levy from every company using hyperlinking (or, perhaps, shut down the web) and quite probably it wouldn’t now have a £5bn hole in its pension fund. (It failed. You guessed.)

ReadWriteWeb observes that

Looking at the patent, it quickly becomes clear that VoloMedia laid out the fundamentals of podcasting in great detail, including how to synchronise content between mobile devices and PCs. Navar argues that in November 2003, it wasn’t obvious that users would start to download episodic content. Given that Dave Winer first met with Adam Curry to discuss the concept in December 2000, however, we really have to wonder if this claim would hold up under greater scrutiny.

Volomedia may claim to have it all wrapped up. Murgesh Navar, its founder, tries to sound ameliorative in his blogpost:

Over the years, I have heard arguments, pro and con, to the utility and necessity of an intellectual property (IP) system. One one hand, there are arguments that say exclusive rights to ideas awarded on a patent excludes others from doing what they want to do and, therefore, IP systems close down access to knowledge. On the other hand, patents and intellectual property rights do drive innovation, as well as investments in new ideas. I do not wish to debate the merits of the U.S. patent system, but just acknowledge there are two sides to the issue of patent awards.

Which is his way, I think, of saying “hey, it’s rough having a patent that we might be able to use to reap millions, but I guess we’ll just have to live with it.”

Intriguing though that it comes up just as Volomedia has laid off its sales team and failed to get a new round of funding. No, we’d never heard of it before either. It sounds as though Volomedia is in a difficult place, financially speaking; possibly it’s realised that its best future lies in being what is being known as a “patent troll” – sitting under the bridge and leaping out to grab people trying to get across what it can claim is its technology.

Wikipedia – which you might have thought would have a chunk of the history of podcasting – is surprisingly vague on the matter, however. Perhaps it’s down to Dave Winer – and his blogs – to provide the prior art on this one.