The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed an earlier decision that invalidates a claim by a company that essentially would have given it control of podcasting, including the right to claim a fee from every person who creates a podcast.

The case was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against Personal Audio LLC, a Beaumont, Texas-based company that lodged a patent, titled “System for Disseminating Media Content Representing Episodes in a Serialized Sequence,” and then used that patent as justification to bill companies and individuals that created podcasts. The patent claimed that Personal Audio — considered by some a “patent troll” created only to make money off patents, not to create a product — had invented podcasting. That’s despite the fact that the company only filed the patent in 2009 and had it approved in 2012, well after what became known as podcasting was already well-known.

According to The Recorder, Personal Audio filed action against CBS Corp., Fox Broadcasting Co., NBCUniversal Media and others in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in 2013 to claim royalties based on the patent and alleged that online podcast versions of CBS’s “60 Minutes” and “Face the Nation” infringed the patent.

“EFF’s petition showed that Personal Audio did not invent anything new and, in fact, other people were podcasting years before Personal Audio first applied for a patent,” the EFF said in a blog post. “Personal Audio challenged the Patent Office decision, but the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed with us that the patent did not represent an invention, and podcasting was known before Personal Audio’s patent was applied for.”

Podcasting – audio recordings of spoken voice usually based around a discussion — first became popular in the late 2000s around the surge of popularity of devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPod, before declining in popularity several years later. The medium has experienced a comeback of sorts over the last five or so years, not coincidentally around the same time Personal Audio started to make its erroneous patent-based royalty claims.

Podcasting will never beat YouTube in terms of popularity, but the win by the EFF is a win for every company that has ever faced dubious patent claims. It also provides case law going forward, setting a precedent in similar claims by patent trolls.

Photo: The Podcave/Wikimedia Commons