Is Microsoft Trying To Kill Us?

What on earth are Microsoft trying to do here? This is the US Software Patent office at its most ridiculous ever!! It has filed a patent on the Windows RSS Platform. Does this apply to Europe?

Part of the application appears to be describing the auto-discovery methods of detecting feeds in a page, but what about the rest of it? Is it for desktop Windows applications? Is it web aggregators? Time to call the lawyer.

If granted, one proposed patent would cover “finding and consuming Web subscriptions in a Web browser.” The invention, for example, could allow a user to “subscribe to a particular Web feed, be provided with a user interface that contains distinct indicia to identify new feeds, and…efficiently consume or read RSS feeds using both an RSS reader and a Web browser.”

I’d like to know what effect this is going to have in Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes, PageFlakes, etc, etc and OF COURSE, podcast.com (which is nearing the end of a major overhaul with regards to feed reading and feed folder organisation – and ‘amplification’) !!! The whole podcast industry (yes, there is one) relies on this so-called invention.

The application was made in July 2005, so surely there’s plenty of prior art? I don’t get it?

Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon apparently does not want to call Microsoft ‘evil’ just yet, but personally I feel like we just had a major shot across our bows. Friendly fire? I think not.

Is this just a way for lawyers to make money? I sometimes I think these departments just sit around working out ways to make eachother money while screwing consumers in the process. A little bit like a nation’s defence department working out ways to keep us on the brink of mass destruction in order to keep their budgets up and brass polished.

Foul!! Microsoft, I denounce thee!!

I just had an idea : Get every web developer in the world to write an RSS reader and post it up online. Let’s see how they deal with that. 🙂