Slashdot Mirror
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.
You would think that since intellectual property protection is so important to Microsoft, they would be more cautious about insuring that nothing they shipped infringed any patents instead of continuing to get caught in these embarassing lawsuits.
Even though this was a loss for Microsoft, I am not happy about that ruling. In my opinion, this shows the harm that patents are doing to the computer industry. I also believe that patents last too long.
There's this really neat feature that IE has (whie no other browser has) is the ability to save a webpage in 1 file. It puts a base64 attachments before the tag, and self-links all the links.
If thats what they're talking about, that stinks.
From the W3C statement:
The implementation can be local or distributed across a network, and is automatically invoked based upon type information in the document or associated with the object's data.
It seems on initial glance that if this patent holds up, it could be argued to apply to the entire model of MIME types by which browsers invoke different behavior based on type.
It also seems to directly apply to the notion of having Word launch when clicking on a ".doc" file.
Couldn't one consider a browser and a word processor to both be "plug-ins" to the operating system? What specifically differentiates a "plug-in" from any other type of application functionality?
Surely there is massive prior art on this going back at least to the early 80's. This patent is obscene.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
If this means the end of overdesigned, shiny and glittery flash sites, and sites that demand IE because they want to use Active X objects etc, then I'm all for it.
I'm not hostile to new technology and all that, but these technologies are so frequently abused so anything that will lessen it will be a good thing.
If the patent covers "mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object" then does OLE also infringe?
Is there really no prior art?
"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!
While I think that most of the current patents, especially the business practices ones, are against the original spirit of the Patent/Copyright/Trademark laws, as far as I know most of these patents fail the requirements for patents. I seem to recall the following things being required for a patent:
While a lot of these patents are useful, I think they pretty much all fail either the Novelness or Unobviousness requirements. I work for a company that patents hinge designs, for crying out loud! I recall the days that a waterbed patent was denied because waterbeds were described in a Heinlein novel. Aren't the patent checkers aware of not just prior art, but novel and unobvious? (It's like the laser cat toy patent of a previous Slashdot article (please help with link) - sure it might be useful, but any doofus 3 year old knows that if you shine a light on a wall a cat will chase it.)
Rather than just yap about this, why don't we form some kind of task force to fight this nonsense?
I'd be happy to join.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
While I would love to see the demise of Flash in favor of SVG, I would be sad to see Java Applets go away.
It is good to have a way to run open-ended software in the user's browser, in a sandbox. For example, the VNC viewer is a java applet. But this particular application of applets was not necessarily what was envisioned when applets were first added to web browsers. I'm thinking of useful applications of java applets, not the latest flashing, blinking, twitching, scrolling seizure inducing eye candy.
Similarly, I don't want to see media players go away. (But I would like to see the demise of proprietary controlled formats.)
One solution is to link the applet capability and the media player capability directly into the browser. Then you probably don't violate this patent.
With an open enough Java implementation, Mozilla for instance, could just include the ability to run java applets.
With an open enough real-player implementation, Mozilla could probably also directly link that code right into the browser.
In fact, Mozilla, or more generally, Open Source browsers could become the "rich" cousins, while proprietary browsers become the feature poor cousins. This would be very ironic.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
The effect this has on Microsoft will be almost nil.. What do they care about what people see in webpages?
The real people to worry should be Quicktime and, Macromedia.
See: the people who use/rely on this technology.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
This might be more bad publicity for Microsoft, but look at the bigger picture.
Software patents are bad. We are now probably not allowed to embed just about anything anywhere. What about flash, java, pdf documents that open in your browser, mime attachments in your emails, stylesheets, etc?
What if someone patents the command-line interface, GUIs, icons, toolbars, media players, p2p technology, archiving, backups, compression, encryption, the way we interact with pcs, vector animations, etc. ?
Patents hurt society in the long run. One person might become rich, but it harms innovation and productivity.
Besides - mozilla-based browsers, konqueror, safari, etc all use plugins. What about them? Do we have to remove this functionality from these opensource browsers as well?
Where will it stop?
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.
hey sign cross licensing agreements with each other stating that they won't sue
This is not what a cross licensing agreement says.
The typical big company cross licensing arrangement goes like this. Okay, we've settled our dispute. Let's not bring patents into the war. (Like nuclear weapons.) So we will cross license eash other with each other's patents. I now have rights to all of your patents, and you have rights to all of my patents. This forecloses the possibility that you will ever sue me over any of your patents. But you still might sue me because I give you defective copies of Windows because I don't like the way you cozy up to Linux.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
The Common Application Platform that the Browser tries to be is braindead anyway.
.NET platform for applications
It would be great to have HTML just that, no DHTML, no javascript.
I'd love to go back to programming applications again but every idea anyone has seems to end up "can we do that in a web browser" and we end up with cookies and an inability to rely on anything being in the other frame.
The result of this mess is the
The Web must die and we must be ready to rebuild it.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
the court had not permitted the jury to consider information on the validity of the patent
filed in 1994.
WTF?
So the PTO hands out patents left and right with the assumption that "they'll get knocked down in court if they're not valid claims".
Then the courts come around and exterminate the ability to disprove the validity?
WTF???
And what else pisses me off is I feel heistant to really say anything strongly negative about the US government, becuase The Department of Homeland Security (AKA Big Brother) is watching.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
It is the fault of a "greedy IP company that is also not making a product" and the government for allowing it to go ahead. Also is there an open source problem here, for instance let us say that MSFT agrees to pay royalites to allow their web browser to continue to work correctly, then the company claims that browsers such as Mozillia must also pay royalities?
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
The reaction of the community in general surprises and saddens me.
Ok, most of us view Microsoft as an enemy. Fine. I have no love lost for M$.
However, in this situation any competent software engineer can see that they are right. The patent is obviously invalid. Any competent software engineer who was around at that time knows that Microsoft had COM and embedded documents long before this patent. Application of these technologies to browsers was obvious and trivial, and should not be covered by a patent due to being obvious.
The honest position would be to fully support Microsoft in this matter, and not to search for possible positive outcomes out of browsers suddenly dropping plugins.
If MS "allows" itself to lose this case, are they not setting a precedent by which Eolas could attempt to attack OS?
Certainly a plug-in model exists in OS and has a GPL-style license. What's to stop Eolas from pulling a SCO and trying to charge everyone who uses OS-based plug-in technology?
It seems convenient that MS would lose on an important issue that could hurt OS much more than MS.