Dave Winer thinks Microsoft is making a move to begin charging for RSS usage:
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.
Personally, I think Dave is making a pretty big leap for a number of reasons. But, even if Microsoft did risk the huge PR fallout that would surely follow any sudden moves with RSS discovery/subscription (the applications are not actually trying to patent RSS itself,) it would only shed further light on the benefits of semantic markup.
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What does semantic markup have to do with any of this?
Much of the patent applications revolves around discovery and reading of syndicated content (in blogs.) If a semantic markup spec (i.e.: hAtom) is implemented, much of what they’re describing would already be possible without even utilizing RSS. I posted about how hAtom works here.