Patently Ridiculous!

I just got round to having a good read of the two patents out there linked by Adam Green regarding feeds and aggregators and auto-discovery of feeds in a web page.

All this would be a huge fly in the ointment for just about every feed aggregator, feed parser, feed browser/grazer out there!! WTF?

I cant tell if these filings (one from Apples' Steven Jobs) have been accepted and processed yet, but buy, this could pose all sorts of problems.

OPML is not mentioned, per se, but there are so many methods of collecting and presenting feeds mentioned here, that various problems could arise, I think.

Has anyone else seen any further discussion and dissection of these patents? If so, could you let me know, as it could put the kibosh on a few things that many of us are working on. 

One comment

  • I agree WTF?

    A bad patent night to say the least here and here. I had not heard of the Apple applications until you posted them though. My first rant had nothing to do with RSS or OPML, just the movie rental business.