It looks like Apple has filed for patents on some uses of RSS. Kevin Burton has some good excerpts from the patents,
Les
Orchard has some good discussion. So far Dave Winer just says "Apple is patenting
our inventions,
again. Oy"
The patents appear to cover Safari (and Firefox) style auto-discovery of RSS feeds
by a browser and Safari (and Feedburner?) sytle variable lengthed displays of feed items. Both patents appear to
have been filed at the end of 2005, so having precedence over the practices of others seems unlikely.
Non-obviousness is another requirement for a patent and I wouldn't be surprised if the autodiscovery by browsers will
be argued on that level.
I know that in the field of genetics it's been argued that patent examiners have
had difficulty applying sufficient knowledge of a relatively new field to these kinds of questions, so hopefully people
like the Berkman center at Harvard (caretakers of RSS 2.0) will be
consulted about the history and nature of RSS.
Apple seeks controversial patents on use of RSS
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Right on Nick, that's the kind of thing people need to see. I can't imagine they are going to get that patent. Maybe the classic Apple tactic of partnering only with themselves has left them out of the loop re anyone but Safari doing these things.
Posted at 2:03PM on Mar 9th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
1. I love Apple, but to this, I have to say F-off, Apple. This feature had been in FireFox and a number of other readers for a while now. Here is a python script from 2002! http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/05/31
Posted at 1:53PM on Mar 9th 2006 by Nick D