Web 2.0 In Depth

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RSS, which is on its way out and being superseded by Atom according to the most recent SYS-CON expert i-Technology Predictions, was created in March 1999 by Dan Libby of Netscape Communications, and so the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.