The EFF Just Won Podcasting Back From A Patent Troll

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Like podcasting wasn’t already hard enough to turn a profit from…

Podcasters in the United States have spent the past five years worrying about being sued by Personal Audio, a company that claimed to own the patent on “a system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence,” or in their minds, podcasting.

As far as patent trolls go, Personal Audio was no joke. They took Apple to court several times over another patent regarding playlists and won millions of dollars. In 2013, they sent out a bunch of “pay or get sued” letters to numerous podcasters including HowStuffWorks, Marc Maron, Majority Report, and Adam Carolla.

Carolla fought back, but Personal Audio dropped the case before getting to the point where a court could invalidate the patents. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now finished the job.

Via Ars Technica:

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 ‘504 patent has a priority date of 1996, but as the EFF showed during its challenge to the patent office, that’s hardly the beginning of “episodic content” on the Internet. The EFF relied on two key examples of earlier technology to beat the patent: one was CNN’s “Internet Newsroom,” which patent office judges found fulfilled the key claims of having “(1) episodes; (2) an updated compilation file; and (3) a ‘predetermined URL’ for the compilation file.”

Personal Audio lawyers tried to save themselves from that one by arguing that the stories on CNN are “not different episodes,” because “the [CNN] news segments are neither a series nor are they a program.” […]

The EFF has taken up various tactics to fight against “patent trolls,” but its fight against the Personal Audio patent was the first time it crowd-funded a patent challenge. The non-profit asked the public to help it raise $30,000 to file the inter partes review. The campaign touched a nerve, and in short order the EFF collected more than $80,000.

This is great news for podcasters and video producers alike. Personal Audio used the same patent to win $1.3 million from CBS last year. The fight may not be completely over, though. The EFF notes that Personal Audio is still seeking new podcasting-related patents based off its original 1996 patents. But for now, content creators can get back to making zero income without having to worry about some patent troll suing them.

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