It seems that the US patent system is regularly abused, so it's no surprise that Microsoft think they can patent the some of the technology related to feed readers, the handy little applications that some of you are probably using to read this post. Microsoft has filed for two patents covering the technology used to organize and read syndicated Web feeds - these patents were made public today after an 18-month period during which applications are kept secret. That means Microsoft filed the patents way back on June 21, 2005. A few days later, they announced a plan to include RSS support in Windows Vista and Internet Explorer.

The two patents (here and here) cover the ability 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." That basically describes a browser-based feedreader.

That would all be great, if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft didn't invent this stuff. The history of RSS goes way back, and Wikipedia has a good summary. Dave Winer, who receives a mention in the Wikipedia entry and frequently claims to be the inventor of RSS, is angry about the move - it's likely that the entire tech community will have a similar reaction when they hear about the patent, which is clearly a case of Microsoft claiming something that isn't theirs. To some extent, we can blame Microsoft, but the broken patent system is also at fault: Amazon famously received a patent for "one click shopping" - buying something in one click. Microsoft may be trying to prevent someone else from filing this utterly obvious patent and attempting to sue them, for instance.

[via]