Powered by the crowd, EFF attacks infamous “podcasting patent”
24 10 2013There are lots of patents out there claiming basic Internet functionalities or business practices, but some of them just hit a nerve. That’s what happened with the so-called “podcasting patent,” a patent on “episodic content” owned by a company called Personal Audio LLC.That company says that inventor Jim Logan’s cassettes-by-mail business, which flopped in 1998, entitles him to a payment from every modern podcaster. Logan also has a patent on organizing playlists that he has used to sue MP3 makers including Samsung, which recently paid an undisclosed amount.
Personal Audio’s cash demands against podcasters big and small. The company sued CBS, NBC, Fox, and the HowStuffWorks podcast and threatened others. That led the Electronic Frontier Foundation to denounce the patent earlier this year. If it could raise $30,000, EFF promised to file a petition attacking the patent at the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/powered-by-the-crowd-eff-attacks-infamous-podcasting-patent/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.
