Who Owns RSS?
Date: Thursday, December 28 2006 @ 14:55:09 EST
Topic: Microsoft Related
On Monday it emerged that Microsoft had applied for two patents
covering subscribing and discovering what it refers to as "Web feeds" -
sparking a furore in the blogosphere and elsewhere that Redmond had
imperial designs on RSS users.
Writing on his website, Microsoft's Don Dodge
tried to pour oil on the troubled waters. "Relax," he wrote. "I believe
Microsoft has no intention of enforcing this patent against anyone, and
no intention of collecting royalties on it."
"I don't have the inside scoop on this yet, but here is what I think," Dodge, who is Director of Business Development for Microsoft's Emerging Business Team, continued:
"Microsoft
is not pretending that they invented RSS...just protecting itself
against potential patent infringement lawsuits from 'shell companies'
and 'patent trolls' who do nothing but sue big companies. Sad to say
this is the current state of the patent system."
"Big
successful companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Google are prime
targets for patent trolls and their lawyers," Dodge added. "These
mostly frivolous lawsuits take years to settle and cost millions of
dollars to defend, even if you win."
Dodge then listed the precedents:
"Google was sued for patent infringement on GoogleTalk. Blackberry was sued, for $612M by NTP. Red Hat was sued
over Hibernate. All of these patent infringement lawsuits cost millions
of dollars to settle. And all of them were about commonly used
technologies that were in the public domain for years...until some
patent troll popped up and produced an obscure patent."
RSS, which is on its way out and being superseded by Atom according to the most recent SYS-CON expert i-Technology Predictions, was
created in March 1999 by Dan Libby of Netscape Communications, and so
the basis for Microsoft's claim seems prima facie to be completely
unfounded.
RDF Site Summary, as Libby's invention was called, was used on the MyNetscape portal.
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