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Plugin Patent to Mean Changes in IE?
hexene writes "The W3C have issued an initial statement on the recent court case of Eolas v. Microsoft in regards to US Patent 5,838,906. The patent relates to the embedding of objects in hypermedia documents, and Microsoft has indicated they will have to make changes to Internet Explorer as a result of the ruling. There may also be far-reaching effects to both other web browser vendors and page authors. Check out the public mailing list to discuss the various issues." See the previous Eolas story for background.
Note that the patent was filed in 1994, but didn't issue until 1998. In those 4 years MS wouldn't have had any knowledge of the pending patent (unless specifically told). By the time '98 rolled around they'd already had the code in use and probably were unaware of the infringement until sued.
"Hypermedia" is what we used to call the often proprietary amalgamation of hypertext and multimedia back before Tim Berners-Lee came along and sorted it all out for us. I don't know about how far back prior art on this goes, but I was quite happily embedding dynamic clocks, calenders and such like in a multi-user hypertext authoring system at Liverpool University in the early 90's. Embedded images, sound and even video was *already* old-hat at this point.
It was an in-house developed tool called MUCH (Many Users Creating Hypertext) written in the Andrew toolkit (think a forerunner of GTk/Qt) and running on HP-UX, if you were wondering.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Konqueror can do that, "Archive Webpage" creates a single .WAR file.
Vote for global prefs bug
from The Pulpit (November last year):
;-), logical analysis?"
But what if they won't settle for money? This brings us to Mike Doyle, who runs tiny Eolas Technology Inc., which controls a patent that covers embedding plug-ins, applets, scriptlets, or ActiveX Controls into Web pages -- the use of any algorithm that implements dynamic, bi-directional communications between an app embedded in a Web page and external applications. That more or less defines how the World Wide Web is used today. As I have written before, Eolas is suing Microsoft for patent infringement, and has been generally wiping the floor with Redmond. Of course, so did the DoJ, and look how THAT turned out. The suit comes to trial in the spring and should be very interesting, not just because of the principles involved, but also because Mike Doyle and Eolas insist they are looking for more than just money.
"It would sure be nice for someone to actually consider all of this from our point of view, rather than MS's," wrote Doyle in a recent message to me. "It amazes me that everyone just assumes that MS will be able to merely write a check and make the whole thing go away. What if someone went through the following, purely theoretical, of course
"Is there any practical settlement amount that is worth more to Eolas than a victory at trial? Considering the facts in the case and the magnitude of the stakes here, a highly likely outcome is that it will actually go to trial, and, once it does, that a jury will award us both damages and an injunction. Injunction is the key word here. That is what patent rights provide: the power to exclude. What if we were to just say no? Or, what if some other big player were to acquire or merge with us? What if only one best-of-breed browser could run embedded plug-ins, applets, ActiveX controls, or anything like them, and it wasn't IE? How competitive would the other browsers be without those capabilities? How would that change the current dynamics in the Industry?"
"One possible scenario is that Eolas would have the power necessary to re-establish the browser-as-application-platform as a viable competitor to Windows. That would be an interesting outcome, wouldn't it? How much would that be worth? The Web-OS concept, where the browser is the interface to all interactive apps on the client side, was always a killer idea. It still is. It lost momentum not because it wasn't economically or technically feasible, but because MS made it unlikely for anybody but them to make money on the Web-client side. Therefore, nobody could justify the necessary investment to take a really-serious shot at it. It doesn't have to be that way, does it? Just think of how we could use this patent to re-invigorate and expand the competitive landscape in this recently-moribund industry. What if we could do what the DOJ couldn't, and in the process make Eolas and everybody else, possibly excluding MS, richer? Wouldn't Eolas stand to profit more in such a scenario than any kind of pre-trial settlement could provide? Wouldn't everybody else?"
"The last couple of years in IT seem to have convinced people that the current status quo will continue indefinitely. They seem to have forgotten what seemed so obvious as little as three years ago, that change is the only invariance. That axiom has always proven out in the past, and I'm certain it will continue to do so in the future."
So will Mike Doyle give in to the Microsoft checkbook or will he opt, instead, to change the world of IT as we know it, knocking Microsoft down to size along the way? And notice how he referred to mergers and investors and being acquired? What if an IBM or an AOL or some party behind door number three was to do exactly that?
As I said, it should be a VERY interesting trial.
You could always just read the darn thing.
... "After launching the program object, the user is able to interact with the object as the invention provides for ongoing interprocess communication between the application object (program) and the browser program." Simply launching external programs with a document to load wouldn't seem to fall under this. However, I could see problems if the browser itself embeds those external programs, like bonobo controls in Nautilus...
My uninformed opinion (from reading only the abstract) is that the MIME type model is not at risk, because
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
It's a long time since I used it, and in a LISP environment, of course, there's really nos such concept as a plugin, but there was analogous functionality in NoteCards.
I would have thought a NoteCards node type was highly analogous to a mime type, and the 'LISP command' was highly analogous to a plugin.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
one of the answers is interesting.
Q. What is the patented technology that was at issue in the case?
A. The patented technology is a key component of the interactivity available on the Internet today. It allows web page developers to embed interactive programs in Web pages. A browser, equipped with the University of California's patented technology, is able to deliver that interactivity to the user. For example, the technology is used often with stock information, video players, games, virtual real estate tours and other interactive content on the Web. The patent allows the Web to be a platform for fully interactive embedded applications.
Sounds like this has broader implications for the Internet at large which the web community may regret. It is not patenting hyperlinks, but I think it gets close.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Excuse me, but I think this is nothing more than a land grab by some greedy "Intellectual Property" company.
It isn't a company - it is a person and about 4 lawyers. Some dude wrote this patent 9 years ago, and now he is worth $500 million (at least).
The patent is ridiculous and I hardly see the patent holder writing their own browser or selling their own system.
That is pretty much exactly what he wants to do. OF course, he will start with $520 million of Microsoft's money...and work on making an OS through the browser. No one else will be allowed to use bi-directional data flow through a browser until 2015!
Microsoft will, of course, do their best with a work-around.
There are probably 100 patents filed for every patent that evolves into an implementation. Maybe 1000. The US PTO is morally bankrupt, and the future of innovation through small inventors is essentially dead. But this case is at least kinda interesting in a soap-opera kinda way.
In this case, the need to go to a more pluggable architecture wasn't immediately obvious at the time, and neither was the solution (plug-ins and switching applications based on content type).
No, it's completely obvious. Given a statement of the problem, any normal software engineer at the time would've decided to switch applications based on content type.
Commercial products that handed off to a different helper program based on a content-type string date from 1988 or earlier. (Although back then, the "content-type" string was often just the final 3 characters of a filename. But it's the same idea)
Want to see some of the original discussion on this patent? Go to this discussion on the www-talk mailing list from 1995, including posts from Mike Doyle of Eolas and other players (including Pei Wei, whose work Microsoft claims as prior art).