The RSS Controversy
There's been a lot of blog posts in the last several days regarding Microsoft's filing of RSS related patents. Despite many negative posts, Don Dodge and Techdirt have provided a balancing perspective. While I am not a patent attorney and have no familiarity with these patents other than what I've read on other blogs, I am very familiar with Microsoft's approach to patents.
Microsoft, like many technology companies such as IBM and Sun, files a larger number of patents every year. Patents serve a number of purposes, including protecting valuable research, licensing to third parties, cross licensing, and defensive reasons. What is exceedingly uncommon, however, is for Microsoft to use its patents offensively. In fact, while I am not aware of any offensive patent action by Microsoft in recent memory, Microsoft itself is the constant target of patent claims.
While the general tone of many posts on this matter is distrust of Microsoft, I think it's important to look at how Microsoft actually makes its patents available. I've written about Microsoft's Open Specification Promise in the past, and I think it is a great example of how Microsoft is making it's patents for select standards available to the community at no charge.
In the RSS space, Microsoft has created the Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML. Microsoft made this RSS extension available under a Creative Commons License and agreed to license it's patents that are infringed by the specification, if any, under royalty free terms. This actually goes beyond the licensing terms of RSS itself, which provides a copyright license under a Creative Commons license but offers no patent assurances at all.
Overall, if you look at Microsoft's track record in the patent space, it simply does not support claims that Microsoft is going to use these patent claims offensively.