Pre-emptive Patents and Prior Art

Many RSS experts reacted with concern after the U.S. Patent office posted two RSS-related patent applications from Microsoft. The applications (which were filed 18 months ago and have not been granted yet) covered two topics: "Finding and consuming web subscriptions in a web browser" and details of a "Content syndication platform [handling] tasks such as creating, reading, updating, deleting feeds and the like". Microsoft's Jane Kim is one of the patent authors, and at about the same time the applications were filed she wrote a blog post discussing RSS support in IE7 and Vista. The patents may be a pre-emptive move to defend against future infringement lawsuits on specific APIs. At the same time, it seems easy to find examples of prior art defining similar concepts, such as Apple's "Techniques for detecting, managing, and presenting syndication XML (feeds)".

Posted by John Dorsey at 02:58 PM  Permalink