Microsoft Nailed by Software Patent

An anonymous reader writes "It was just announced that Microsoft lost the case where it was accused of violating Eolas' patent on embedded applications in the Internet Explorer browser. They have been fined $521 million in damages."

Comments

hmmm

[Coneasfast]

Patents on the simple idea of plug-ins and applets? This seems almost as ridiculous as the amazon patent on one click purchasing.

Hard to know what to feel.

[MikeFM]

I dislike Microsoft but I still don't see that this helps the development community or users at all. Software patents are stupid and a bad idea.. even when being used against that monopoly we love to hate. Anyone with an interest in the freedom of developers to develop what they want and the freedom of users to choose the best product for their needs can't see this as anything but a loss.

Re:Great!

[Mr. Troll]

Yeah, just some other no name company sitting on a patent waiting for someone to do something with it......then skimming profits.....this is the kind of things that killlllls delelopment

Patent whores who just sit around and WAIT for someone to sue.....heaven FORBID they actuall DO anything with their patent.....no, just sit and wait...just like SCO....just like those creeps who screwed EBAY....THIS is the problem with the web today

Before you start bitching about slashdot users...

[Dalroth]

Before you start bitching about Slashdot user's being hypocrites, keep in mind that Slashdot is a community filled with 1000's of a users who all have very different opinions on everything.

I do not support this ruling, because I do not support patents in any way shape or form. That does not mean the Slashdot community as a whole feels the same.

In fact, it's very hard to determine just what it is the Slashdot community DOES believe, because more often than not it's the negativity that makes it through the ranking system more than anything else.

Some people will call this a great victory for Open Source. I don't. I think it's a travesty, but that's my opinion and mine alone. Other's may or may not agree, but please don't let one person's opinion spoil your view of the entire community.

Bryan

Bad precedent

[Eloquence]

Software patents being enforced are always a bad precedent, no matter against whom. Hopefully, big corporations will wake up to the patent scam, which primarily benefits lawyers and idea pirates. Innovation does not come from patents, according to Cisco's VP of "Intellectual Property". He stated in an interview:

Patents don't stimulate innovation, they capture and protect innovation. My experience at Cisco is that the ability to get patents is not what inspires new developments. Instead, competition has been the major stimulus of innovation at Cisco. Our engineering teams are motivated by the desire to quickly turn their ideas into products and services that customers want, solutions that will help our customers improve their productivity. They don't ask "can we patent this?" before deciding whether to create new solutions.

In order to "capture and protect" innovation, companies register more and more patents each year, often just to prevent others from suing them. But some companies register patents for the sole purpose of engaging in legal warfare -- a risky gamble with potentially huge prizes.

The biggest danger inherent in software patents is to free software. Megacorporations can easily collect thousands of patents on trivial processes to use against open source programmers who have little means to defend themselves. Wait for Microsoft and others to attack on this front -- that would be nice extra FUD fodder with all the SCO crap going on right now. To ignore software patents as Linus Torvalds does is the wrong approach. They must be eliminated entirely.

And Java applets in Navigator are not prior art?

[notAyank]

Can somebody explain this to me? How can this patent exist when in 1998 there were applets / plugins running inside Netscape Navigator doing all the things the patented method does:

1. They were embedded in the "hypermedia" document
2. They could communicate with the browser
3. They could communicate with the server (at least by using sockets and datagrams)
4. By doing this they were "providing the user of the client computer with interactive features and allowing the user to have access to greater computing power than may be available at the user's client computer."

Sorry, but I think MS should be in the clear here.

Re:Peanuts

[TopShelf]

I'm assuming this is a troll, but I'll bite anyway - layoffs occur when structural changes are made to a business. Nobody sees a tangible difference in how Microsoft would do business as a result of this. They'll probably just tie this up in appeals for the next several years anyway, ensuring happy employment for lots of hard-working, blue collar lawyer types...

patent warchests

[mitomac]

IBM, Microsoft, Apple all have giant patent portfolios. When a small company like Eolas can nail microsoft for a patent violation it does not bode well for linux. If IBM can b*tch slap SCO with patent violations regarding hierarchial graphical menus. What is to stop them or any other patent hoarder from making the same claim against linux? Currently, these companies refrain from suing each other because they know the other company likely has patents they are violating...But what ace in the hole patents does linux have up its sleeve?

mitomac

What if this happened to Mozilla and friends?

[raw-sewage]

As much as I like to see Microsoft get slammed, it scares me to think what might happen if these patent-enforcement lawsuits were directed at the open source community. I didn't bother to actually research the details of that patent referenced in this case, but what if Mozilla or Konqueror or another open source browser infringes on the same patent?

Microsoft is a nice target for lawsuits: they're big, visible and have lots of money. However, what if an open source browser had a more significant market share? Wouldn't that same patent-portfolio group come demanding royalties?

This is a more general concern that scares me; it may be tested by the SCO-IBM case(s). Say a company patents some software technology. What if the developers working on that code go home at night and use the same concepts in some open source projects? I emphasize concepts because the developers are smart enough not to copy code, but a patent covers an idea, not a specific implementation.

A lot of this paranoia comes from my co-worker, who is pro-Microsoft and very much anti-open source. He is absolutely convinced that open source is communism, and that it clashes with capitalism. He loves to suggest the above scenario and predict that the GPL will ultimately fail in court...

...because it blocks someone's right to profit. Not only can you not get anything for free in the U.S., but it's getting to the point where you can't give anything away!

Finally, back to Microsoft: don't they have over $40 billion in cash? So $500 million is 1/80th of $40 billion. That's like having $400 and being fined $5. Oh, that hurts. Is anyone here an accountant? How much of that gets written off in taxes? It's really a joke, in my mind.

Of course I don't know the details of the case, but $500 million seems weak. Microsoft has said that IE is now a critical part of Windows. Windows and Office are the only two sources of revenue for Microsoft... doesn't that somehow make IE a critical part of their income stream? And they only got fined five bucks for it?

This is very very bad

[deanj]

I've been following the Eolas lawsuit for a long time now, and this is bad folks.

They basically have a patent on any embedded technology in a browser. A lot of people have looked into this, and so far have come up with nothing. The earliest "application" in a browser technology I'm aware of is Vosaic, but I can't get ahold of anything that shows what date that was originally set up.

This screws Flash, Java applets, and all kinds of other things. Watch for more lawsuits in the future.

One can only dream...

[kcbrown]

As far as I know, Microsoft hasn't ever actually started a patent infringement suit against anyone (examples to the contrary welcome, of course).

That being the case, and given the fact that they lost this lawsuit, there are a number of things that could happen:

1. Microsoft could just pay up and otherwise leave things alone, chalking this up to the cost of "doing business".
2. Microsoft could appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court.
3. Microsoft could push for some type of legislation to reduce the risk of a repeat performance.
4. Microsoft could buy the company that hit them with this suit, along with other similar companies, and then start suing others through their newly-acquired companies.

The interesting question is: which of the above would represent the best thing for the free software community, and how likely is it to happen?

Things obviously don't get any better initially if they cave, though the long-term consequences might be of benefit (if they cave and just pay, then other patent-holding companies will be very much encouraged by that and we'll probably end up seeing many more such suits by such companies, and eventually the big corps will Do Something about the problem, though I suspect the end result will benefit only them and not us).

If Microsoft appeals to the Supreme Court, they can only do so if they have some sort of Constitutional argument. That's not as far-fetched as it sounds, because they can very legitimately question whether or not the patent in question and others like it meets the intent of the clause in the Constitution upon which patent law itself is based. If it weren't for the fact that Microsoft hates to lose and generally tries to win at all costs, I would totally dismiss this as a possibility.

If Microsoft pushes for some sort of legislation, the natural question is what that legislation would look like. My cynical outlook forces me to think that the resulting legislation would somehow raise the barrier of entry for either acquiring a patent or prosecuting a patent so high that only megacorps like Microsoft would be able to participate. Problem solved, along with the problems of these pesky little IP companies and free software types.

Finally, Microsoft could buy the company in question out, but that might be the same thing as IBM buying SCO out as far as end results go, with the end result being that every little upstart IP company will be suing the likes of Microsoft in order to get bought out. If Microsoft has a big enough patent portfolio, then they really don't need to do this and thus probably won't.

I'll bet Eolas is going to get lots of visits from the BSA from now on...