Did VoloMedia invent Podcasting?
They claim they did, in late 2003. I’m certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law, but 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. 1/11/01: Payloads for RSS. Through out 2001 we did trials and experiments to learn how the protocol worked in practice. Radio UserLand, shipped in Jan 2002, was both a podcast distributor and a podcast client. By July 2003, I had helped Chris Lydon boot up his series of podcast interviews with the new bloggers of the day. All that happened before VoloMedia filed their patent application. Or so it seems. ReadWriteWeb has a piece on the patent.
