Over at Scripting News: 12/21/2006, Dave Winer blogs, “Today I received a link to a patent granted to Microsoft, where they claim to have invented all this stuff. Presumably they’re eventually going to charge us to use it. This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS.”
I’m no patent expert (and don’t think software patents should exist), but reading through this documentation, it looks like Microsoft is trying to patent the process of accumulating feeds and presenting them in different formats. That’s no invention of theirs! Dave’s Radio UserLand did that (first, as far as I know). Bloglines does it. Planet does it. Yahoo! Reader does it. Google Reader does it. Jeez, just about everyone but Microsoft does it. What is their invention?