Free for a Fee

Hold onto your iPhones—a company called VoloMedia was yesterday granted a patent on a “method for providing episodic media content.” Or, as the company puts it in today’s announcement, VoloMedia now owns the “US patent for podcasting.” Prepare to pay up?

Even the patent’s chief inventor, Murgesh Navar, knows that the claim is controversial. Before anyone had time to start asking questions about the patent, Navar authored a blog post explaining just why he’s entitled to control podcasting. The short answer: he’s been working on it for years.

The patent in question “was filed in November 2003, almost a year before the start of podcasting. This helps underscore the point, that for nearly six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media… Today, podcasting is 100 percent RSS-based. However, the patent is not RSS-dependent. Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads. It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.”

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