Podcasting Community Faces Patent Troll Threat; EFF Wants to Help

The patent was filed in 2009. I wrote a podcast fetcher for an obscure Archos device in 2005. It was hardly the first app like that. But just based on my own personal experience, the things that this patent covers were in wide use at least 4 years before it was filed.

I can't say I've read any of this in detail, but on the surface it might be the most ridiculous one of these patent stories I've seen in a long time.

My thing was a fetcher, not a distribution system, but if there hadn't already been a well established standard for distribution (RSS), I wouldn't have had any reason to write it.

I would really like to see the EFF try to get a precedent which solves this problem in the general case, rather than invalidating just this one patent. And I think I know what the solution has to be: class-action defense.

What's going on is this. They have a pretext to sue, which is not good enough to win, but is good enough to keep the case from being dismissed on summary judgment and to keep them from being ruled vexatious litigants. They use this pretext to start hundreds or thousands of copies of the same case, against different defendants, achieving economy of scale. If the case proceeds, the defense has to spend much more (even if they win), because they have no such economy of scale. So they're forced to settle instead.

But suppose one defendant could force the patent troll, in a pre-summary-judgment motion, to reveal the identities of everyone else they'd threatened with the same patent. That would allow the defendants to pool legal costs, merge all the cases into one courtroom, and have a fair trial, rather than just being extorted.

One of the issues here is the Apple settled with 'Personal Audio' and handed them $8 million -

http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/09/apple-coughing-up-8-milli...

Small change for Apple, but could now establish a precendent for judges who don't really understand technology and have to go by patent law.