A year-and-a-half after the Electronic Frontier Foundation created a crowd-funded challenge to a patent being used to threaten podcasters, the patent has been invalidated.

In late 2013, after small podcasters started getting threat letters from Personal Audio LLC, the EFF filed what's called an "inter partes review," or IPR, which allows anyone to challenge a patent at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The order issued today by the USPTO lays to rest the idea that Personal Audio or its founder, Jim Logan, are owed any money by podcasters because of US Patent No. 8,112,504, which describes a "system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence."

The '504 patent has a priority date of 1996, but as the EFF showed during its challenge to the patent office, that's hardly the beginning of "episodic content" on the Internet. The EFF relied on two key examples of earlier technology to beat the patent: one was CNN's "Internet Newsroom," which patent office judges found fulfilled the key claims of having "(1) episodes; (2) an updated compilation file; and (3) a 'predetermined URL' for the compilation file."

Personal Audio lawyers tried to save themselves from that one by arguing that the stories on CNN are "not different episodes," because "the [CNN] news segments are neither a series nor are they a program."

EFF's other key piece of "prior art" consisted of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts, like the science show Quirks & Quarks, which was distributed online well before Personal Audio's 1996 priority date.

Podcasts online

The EFF has taken up various tactics to fight against "patent trolls," but its fight against the Personal Audio patent was the first time it crowd-funded a patent challenge. The non-profit asked the public to help it raise $30,000 to file the inter partes review. The campaign touched a nerve, and in short order the EFF collected more than $80,000.

Personal Audio gave up on getting royalties from podcasters in 2014 after a lawsuit against comedian Adam Carolla almost went to trial. Carolla, who has one of the most popular podcasts, rallied his listeners after he was sued by Personal Audio and spoke out against "patent trolls" in Congress. He raised more than $500,000 from his fans, but ultimately settled with the company. Personal Audio backed off of podcasters, not because it recognized the limits of its patent, but rather because they were too poor to be worth suing.

However, the company pushed ahead against television studios, believing that its patent covered "episodic content" that included online video. It took its case against CBS to trial and won $1.3 million.

“We’re glad the Patent Office recognized what we all knew: ‘podcasting’ had been around for many years and this company does not own it,” said EFF lawyer Daniel Nazer.

Another EFF attorney who worked on the podcasting patent, Vera Ranieri, pointed out that even though there's "a lot to celebrate here," Personal Audio is still seeking podcasting-related patents. "We will continue to fight for podcasters, and we hope the Patent Office does not give them any more weapons to shake down small podcasters," she said.

The history of Personal Audio dates to the late 1990s, when Jim Logan created a company seeking to create a kind of proto-iPod digital music player. But his company flopped. Years later, Logan turned to lawsuits to collect money from those investments. He sued companies over both the "episodic content" patent, as well as a separate patent, which Logan and his lawyers said covered playlists, that wrung verdicts or settlements from Samsung and Apple.

Unlike many non-practicing patent owners, which are sometimes derided as "patent trolls," Logan didn't hide from his patent campaign. He spoke publicly about his company's history and his reason for pursuing patent royalties, giving interviews to National Public Radio and the CBC and doing a Q&A on Slashdot.

His product concept was "a handheld MP3 player that could download off the Internet some kind of personalized audio experience," Logan told the CBC last year. "We designed that, we prototyped it, we went to investors trying to raise money to produce the product, and we were not successful."