Microsoft Applies for RSS Patent

The technical world in which we actually work is relatively free of contest and struggle: you don’t have to arm-wrestle anyone to load up your copy of Word or argue for the right to check your email (though our partners — no, the other kind — if we have them, might prove me wrong). But beneath this serene “desktop” there’s continual conflict.

Most of us use RSS, at least I hope so, given Slaw’s role among tech leaders in law. We don’t think or care about who owns it; likely we don’t even formulate the thought that way: who could “own” something like RSS anyway. It seems, however, that yesterday Microsoft applied for a U.S. patent on RSS technology, claiming that their people invented it. There’s a decent discussion of the fuss it has (and hasn’t) created over at ZDNet’s Between the Lines.

There isn’t much “up-in-arms-ing” yet in the blogosphere, maybe because everyone’s suffering from patent-shock fatigue. Think back to the alarm that there was when the ubiquitous GIF graphic format was discovered to belong to UnisysThat patent has now expired.. Or when the news went around that Microsoft had got a patent for “double clicking.” Shock, horror, yawn. This is not to say that patents are irrelevant; just that their impact on our daily lives is more muted than we sometimes fear. I trust that whether Microsoft or Biap Systems, another competitor for a patent on RSS, actually obtain a patent, we’ll still be pumping out our feeds and you’ll still be reading them — partners willing, of course.