@radley, this is interesting, given that the effective filing date of the patent was in November 2003. If this was a January 2002 podcast, it would come under Section 102(b) of the patent statute, which says: "A person shall be entitled to a patent unless - ... (b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States ...."

And section 103(a) says: "(a) A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. ..."

The problem that I can see with this document is that there's no clear indication of when this document was first made available to the public.

I get that the lectures were published in '02, but what's at issue is when this particular page was published. As far as I can tell, the only thing that dates this document particularly is the lastBuildDate in '06.