Saving Podcasts From A Patent Troll

Marc Maron is the host of a successful podcast, and when he and some other pioneers started out he didn’t have to think much about the layers of technology he was using, until a patent troll came to call, asking for thousands of dollars to pay for the “rights” to  podcasting because of a patent they were mis-using to get money from the nascent podcast world. Marc and his producer Brendan knew that if they didn’t take up the fight to stop the trolls, then all of podcasting would be under threat, so they joined up with some EFF lawyers and a whole lot of listeners to win their fight. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• The prior art, or evidence of earlier technology that EFF was able to present to courts to prove that the so-called “podcasting patent” was invalid.
• How the landmark Alice v. CLS Bank Supreme Court decision has helped make patent law better, but still didn’t solve the problem of patent trolls
• Why patent trolls are a drain on innovation
• How we should think about which ideas should be building blocks for the public good, and which should be owned
• Why the community that came together around the podcasting patent fight was critical to EFF’s victory
• How EFF prevailed when the patent troll tried to get the names of EFF donors.

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. Please visit the site page at https://eff.org/pod110 where you’ll find resources – including links to important legal cases and research discussed in the podcast and a full transcript of the audio. 

This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators:

Warm Vacuum Tube by Admiral Bob (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Unported license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/admiralbob77/59533 featuring starfrosch

Drops of H2O ( The Filtered Water Treatment ) by J.Lang (c) copyright 2012 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Unported license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/djlang59/37792 Ft: Airtone

Xena's Kiss / Medea's Kiss by mwic (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Unported license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/mwic/58883

reCreation by airtone (c) copyright 2019 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) Unported license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/59721