Personal Audio LLC owns patents related to podcasting—"episodic content transmitted over the internet"—and a jury in Marshall, Texas has let CBS know it.
Personal Audio is a holding company, cobbled together from the patents that were left after a failed startup that Jim Logan founded in 1996. The company became one of the poster children for problematic patents when it claimed that its patent number 8,112,504 was infringed by podcasters, including comedian Adam Carolla. Instead of settling quickly, though, Carolla fought back hard before settling last month.
Adam Carolla is another podcaster sued by these guys; he settled for up to $500,000 last month. Trials will now move forward against NBC, Fox, and other deep-pocketed companies who host HTML files that allow episodic content to be transmitted over the internet, that being the technology patented by Personal Audio LLC.
