On Friday, the United States Patent Office ?trashed key elements of the so-called "podcasting patent," the result of a series of petitions submitted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against what the organization describes as a classic case of patent trolling. So ends the first chapter in an ugly saga pitting a Texas holding company against any and all who dare to provide serialized content via the internet.

?To hear the proprietors of Personal Audio, LLC tell it, the birth of podcasting took place in 1996 in the city of Beaumont, Texas. There were no iPods then and acquiring media via the internet was a chore disguised as a novelty, but the "inventors" Jim Logan, Dan Goessling, and Charles Call saw the future: "a mission of offering personalized audio to listeners over the Internet." The rest is history—except, not really.

What Personal Audio actually built was a patent application, resulting in ?patent no. 8,112,504 B2: "System for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence." What came next was a whole lot of nothing. ?In the words of Personal Audio vice president of licensing Richard Baker, it was placed in a drawer for 10 years. The technology went unrealized, with Personal Audio's founders claiming to have run out of money before being able to actually do anything with the idea.

Unfortunately, our work to protect podcasting is not done.

Indeed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation considers Personal Audio to be the very definition of a patent troll: an entity that holds an idea hostage until someone else decides to make something like it and then sues the shit out of them. Trolling is a massive and rapidly growing mutation of US patent law—by 2012, ?nearly 40 percent of all patent litigation centered around the actions of trolls or non-practicing entities (NPEs), organizations that exist entirely to monetize patents through lawsuits and threats of lawsuits against those deemed to have infringed on a patent.