I think I broke my brain as a result of trying to make even more sense out of the podcasting patent issued to Volomedia, or to use the language of the patent, the “method for providing episodic media content.”

First, Volomedia is a member of the Association of Downloadable Media (ADM) and after my post (and a few others) pretty much questioning why Volomedia’s press release appeared as a post on the ADM blog, ADM added a disclaimer at the beginning of the post and wrote an additional post about its policy on company announcements on the ADM blog.

Another post followed in Q&A style with Murgesh Navar, founder of Volomedia, answering questions from ADM about the patent. You can read it in full here, but to sum up, Murgesh explained the goal of the patent:

1. to define standards and give consumers of episodic media options in how they consume the content.
2. to provide ways to measure episodic media in a synchronous way.

Okay, here’s where my brain started hurting, but one thing is clear – there’s a disconnect between what a patent is and what Volomedia is stating is his company’s intent with the patent.

According to Wikipedia, a patent is:

a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention.

As I read the page further, I stumble upon this:

A patent is not a right to practice or use the invention. Rather, a patent provides the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the patented invention for the term of the patent, which is usually 20 years from the filing date subject to the payment of maintenance fees.

So, in my laywoman interpretation, Volomedia can exercise their right to exclude others from making, using, selling or offering for sale whatever measurement standard they plan on developing (according to Muresh’s Q&A with ADM, Volomedia wants to provide standards).

Now, I **could** support this patent if it weren’t so vague and generic. Stating that you want to provide a “method for providing episodic media content” is the language that’s making those who provide episodic content very nervous.

If the patent awarded was for a “method for providing measurement standards for episodic media content,” that would still make a few people nervous, more specifically, those who provide advertising in episodic media content (which I don’t). However, for someone like me who does NOT use advertising in any of my podcast episodes, this patent wouldn’t have bothered me one bit.

Yet, the way the patent reads right now, it states that Volomedia has “the right to exclude others from making, using, selling or offering for sale episodic media content.” And that’s what’s got most of the podcasting community miffed.

I still question the disconnect between what Muresh says is Volomedia’s intent with the patent and what it actually states, but for now, I’ll wait and see. What I will point out is that this won’t be the last time we’ll hear from Volomedia. It has 6 additional patents applications in the pipeline. Go to the US Patent Office Search page and type in Podbridge, the company that Volomedia was known under way back. All were filed in 2005.

Update: My friend Karin Hoegh tweeted a link to an interesting blog post about this topic on the unofficial Apple weblog. In the blog post by Steven Sande, he wrote that Skype (owned by eBay) may be one of the early losers due to the Volomedia patent.