You can listen to this before I do... if you hurry

A couple of years ago, This American Life did one of the best pieces of reporting to date on patent trolling. Now they have a followup which Felix Salmon calls "fantastic," though I'm not sure if he means 'great' or 'the stuff of fantasy' (both would seem to apply).

I just downloaded the episode and I didn't pay these guys a dime:

Host Ira Glass and Zoe Chace from NPR’s Planet Money talk with Jim Logan and Richard Baker of Personal Audio, which claims it holds a patent used by all podcasters. Podcasters, they say, owe them money. Only catch: their company never made a digital podcast or invented a way to download it into a listening device. What they did, back in 1996: they patented the idea that such a thing can be done. Now they’ve asked podcasters to pay them licensing fees.