I'm not sure that the indep claim covers the way podcasts are delivered nowadays. Claim 1 seems to require a single channel which both provides notification of new content and from which new content is downloaded. But, an RSS feed for a podcast just provides a URL pointing to the content. No one really downloads anything from an RSS feed.
My guess is that if this patent reads on any technology in use now, it's probably something more like dvrs or on demand TV.
Caveat: I haven't read the specification, so it's possible that there's a special definition that I'm missing.
"VoloMedia, which used be called Podbridge, filed for this particular patent in November 2003 — a time, Navar said, before it was obvious that people would download episodic content such as podcasts."
Ok, now 2003 still a little late to the game as far as I'm concerned, but 5.5 years to award a patent? Whether or not patents are a good thing, the patent office and the tech industry cannot work together with such long lead times.
@radley, this is interesting, given that the effective filing date of the patent was in November 2003. If this was a January 2002 podcast, it would come under Section 102(b) of the patent statute, which says: "A person shall be entitled to a patent unless - ... (b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States ...."
And section 103(a) says: "(a) A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. ..."
The problem that I can see with this document is that there's no clear indication of when this document was first made available to the public.
I get that the lectures were published in '02, but what's at issue is when this particular page was published. As far as I can tell, the only thing that dates this document particularly is the lastBuildDate in '06.
