Slashdot Mirror
Can Lotus Notes R3 Prior Art Save The Browser?
theodp writes "Apparently stunned by the implications of Eolas vs Microsoft, Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes and Groove fame offers up Notes R3 as prior art for the notorious Eolas patent. To bolster his argument, Ozzie used the Notes R3 feature set to recreate a scenario close to what was described in the patent. After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay, it only took Ozzie about 15 minutes to knock out a demo without any programming using the out-of-the-box UI of Notes and Excel."
I was really hoping this suit would make for a better IE.
It's a half BILLION dollar lawsuit.
$500M, not $500k.
Specifically, 521 million dollars.
Something tells me Eolas broke out the champagne after that verdict...
I'm beginning to wonder..... perhaps a community "Prior Art" effort, somewhat comparable to the open source community, is needed.
Identify, research and debunk such absurd/greedy patents (and perhaps eventually much or all of the software patents nonsense) so as to get the patents withdrawn/cancelled.... and/or reassigned to some "open source" holder.
Might eventually be able to deconstruct much of the current software patent farce.
Or perhaps the "open source" community could get some showstopper patents of its own, to use as leverage against overreaching/absurdist patent holders holders to. Perhaps even get other altruistic patent holders to donate their patents to a pool of such patents held by an "open source" protector, so as to grow them and increase the leverage.
AC comments get piped to
I think if someone else challenges the patent and it is found to be invalid, then MS could get let off the hook. It wouldn't make any sense to say that the patent was valid but suddenly became invalid, and people would still have to pay if they lost a case earlier.
Just a guess.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
...if this proves to be the thing that lets us keep plugins in the public domain.
As a Flash developer, the idea that users would have to take some convoluted route to access a movie I made just so some fat jerk can get rich really ticks me off.
The U.S. Patent Office needs to get up to speed and stop issuing patents on trivial systems features. I mean, using sub-programs in programs is something I have done in C++ since the late 80s. WTF Why is a Web browser supposed to be so special a thing that someone can issue a patent on a standard engineering process?
M
Patenting plugins is like patenting the idea of DIY home improvement - ludicrous (although I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already patented the latter...)
If you did use it for customers in the disputed time frame, then your use has satisfied the commercially valuable part.
Basically patents are instruments in commerce. Something was allowed to be patented, i.e. denied to rest of society, if it was shown to have a commercial value, and hence an incentive for the patent holder or agents thereof. It was believed that the benefits from an inventor implementing a patent dwarfed the negatives of denying the rest of the society from being able to freely build upon it.
Your using it for cutomers means that the patent cannot be claimed under new-use as there is nothing "new" about it, and Ray's whole article shows that the patent can't be claimed under "new" method as neither is the method new.
Guess, it means that the patent should be busted.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Especially the Cookies thing.
Without them, there is absolutely no way for web based applications to maintain state across pages, meaning that there's hardly a web application in the world that would still work.
Sheesh...
There's also some real compelling java applets too - like a Library catalogue I rememeber using once.
And Flash... Well, I tend to mostly agree with you, but oh well.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Some sites are unusable WITHOUT having Flash. That's not the way we should be going.
While a nice, extremely far-fetched thought that would work in theory, when you figure out how to replicate the content of Homestar Runner in text, let me know!
Eolas: "Internet Explorer uses plug-ins?! WTF?! When did M$ start doing that? I invented those things, dammit! I'mma sue 'em" In fairness, Eolas started making noises about this stuff early in 1995, and did notify the browser vendors that applets would be covered by their patent application. All said they'd wait and see if the patent was approved before doing anything. So the patent was approved, no one had done anything, and after a bunch of hearings and appeals, here we are. So, the Eolas thing was hardly a surprise. The big surprise is that so little apparent effort went into coming up with decent alternatives until the last minute.
IANAL (nor are probably 99% of the other people commenting), but this may not count as prior art. The important thing about prior art is that it is made up PRIOR to the patent in question. If someone patented the wheel, and I then read the patent (think blueprint) for it, I too could take a hammer, saw, chisel, etc. and scream "Look how obvious this is!"
In this case, if someone can prove they created a similar combination of program(s) prior to October 17, 1994, that would stand a much better chance of invalidating the patent. A mockup done in 2003 likely will not.
If Microsoft needs prior art to disprove these patents perhaps they should have a look at X Windows and any version of Unix circa 1993. I used to do exactly what these patents claim using a threaded news reader called xrn. In addition to being obvious and therefore not patentable it was common practice in a variety of applications including Framemaker to name just one commercial application that did this. I certainly hate to be the one to help out M$ but some of these software patents are debilitating.
I can't even see them releasing the source, under NDA, to Microsoft.
Similarly the case for Real Player, and Quicktime.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Ultimately, all the technically adept -> sexually undesirable propaganda among the nerd community is self-defeating. Girls like guys who talk big, not guys who commiserate about being losers.
For a counter-example, take a look at the Jews. They have managed to tie male intelligence into sexual desirability for thousands of years. Torah scholars get some serious action. And all of is based on a concerted propaganda effort by those same Torah scholars. You should read the stuff they write. It is a constant barage of "study the Bible and get women hanging all over you."
Sure, that sort of eugenics program has not resulted in too many Jewish supermodels, but damn if they don't make great physicists, doctors, and lawyers.
The abuse of patent protections used not to inovate but to be supress them is necessary to point out the absurdity of our current patent laws. If judgements in suits like these were based on the actual value that had been created by the patent holder instead of the value created by the patent infringer, the protections provided by patents would make a lot more sense. This would prevent people creating patents as a direct revenue source instead of creating patents to protect actual products they're producing. A patent by itself would only be capable of preventing someone from infringing it but not as tool for extortion.
Flash as a built-in browser feature?
Yes. In the future. It will be called SVG.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Keep in mind, that if Microsoft is screwed over with abuse of a patent, you might be next.
I disagree. In fact, I would argue quite the opposite.
So there is no doubt, let me be clear. If Microsoft is screwed over by abuse of a patent, then you might never get screwed by patent abuse.
Here on my planet, the government will do anything to protect poor Microsoft. Anything that is bad for Microsoft must be bad for everyone else too. Anything that hurts Microsoft could cripple the economy. Maybe the economy of the world. Technological innovation would stop. In fact, civilization as we know it could come to an end.
So the argument goes. (Please do not interpret anything in the previous paragraph as being my point of view, because it decidedly is _not_.)
Now those whose IQ is higher than their Karma should be able to connect the dots together.
We can moan on Slashdot forever about the broken patent system. But let an upstanding, shining example of true American greed...er..um... values such as Microsoft get screwed by patent abuse, and maybe something will happen to reform the broken patent system.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
At a really fundamental level, how different is transparently running a plug-in on a web page different from a program written in C or C++ causing a DLL written in Assembler to execute?
Are printer (and other device) drivers all that different than plug-ins?
When I click the Print icon, aren't I in effect asking the operating system to transparently execute a separate ("plug-in") program, the printer driver, to perform a task for me?
Or am I missing the point here?
Read this!
It's a USA Today story from the cover (!) in 1996.
Important points:
Dr. Doyle (Eolas) isn't trying to squash Mozilla or anything like that. What he was hoping to do would be to force Microsoft, Sun, etc. to join an organization where they would standardize their architecture. He declared the current state of things then as a "hodgepodge", and it still is today (EJB vs. NET vs. DCOM vs. SOAP vs. agent archs). He claimed he would provide free licenses to anyone who would cooperate. He also thought maybe he'd get funding from some guy who was afriad of Microsoft or Oracle, and wanted his help to one-up what they had.
That ain't going to happen now.
I'm pretty sure he's cutting his losses and JUST going after the biggest fish in the pond.
You can also read his letter to the readership of DDJ (they had many of the same opinions as Slashdotters I've read so far).
Scroll down to the letters section. You may need to sign up for access. Alternatively, I will include a quote without permission.
This guy isn't the bad guy. He's just a dude who tweaked up his web browser for medical imageing, and had a bright idea. The University hired Townsend, Townsend and Crew to file the patent, and they couldn't come up with anything at the time. Maybe the weren't Lotus users?
In any case, since this guy wasn't a CS major (Biology), he probably wouldn't have been privy to Lotus. He was an academic Unix guy, and Lotus was big in business circles. I can't blame him, and think Ray Ozzie needs to get off his soapbox.
Lotus is dead man, don't give Microsoft any ammo. Doyle wants Microsoft to start playing nice, and you're undermining that. Great way to see your vision through Ozzie; they (Ozzie and Doyle) both had the same vision and I think he fails to realize how alike their thinking and motives are.
Microsofts' are less pure.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Did the inventor take several years to get around to sueing Microsoft? Or did they spend a couple of years in pointless un-negotiations? Many corporations will pretend to be negotiating while sending their legal beagles trying to break the patent instead. Some companies would rather spend $10,000,000 to break a patent that the inventor only wants $500,000 for. Some inventors want to stiff companies for $100,000,000 when their invention is worth $100,000. One can find cases to support any position you want. Which is what legal briefs are supposed to do.
The problem with patents isn't that they're granted too easily. It isn't that patents are granted for obvious processes, or processes already in existence. It isn't even that patents can hide in a product for years, gaining in popularity, before the patent owner demands payment (though that particular aspect really disgusts me). The real problem with patents is that there's no financial cap on the "reward" the patent owner can demand.
In this case, Eolas got half a BILLION dollars. I can't imagine that even if this patent has merit (I don't think it does) that the staff at Eolas have truly produced something of that worth. There is no way Eolas invested anything like that into research for their patent. Even if Eolas had a rare genius on their staff who invented something truly unique and revolutionary, no single person can produce half a BILLION dollars of worth.
Oh sure, that's just "capitalism" somebody will say. The property owner gets to pick the price. Mysterious "market forces" will sort everything out. But in the case of patents there are no market forces. Patent owners enjoy a monopoly where nobody can legally compete. The patent owners can set their prices sky-high and nobody can undercut them.
Rather than putting the onus on the patent review process to "weed out" the bad patents - which I personally believe is an impossible task - there should instead be a financial valuation done of patents before they are granted. The patent owner can document their expected earnings from the patent. If the patent owner poorly estimates the expected earnings (claims a future earning of $1mill but collects half a BILLION dollars) then something is almost certainly wrong.
This way companies (incl. Microsoft) can easily identify any patents that may financially harm them in the future and invest more effort into disproving their merit. If the patent owner truly believes their patent is worthy then they can invest more time and money into defending the patent. This is pure self-interest at work, so I have every confidence that it will work.
The current patent system is like a lottery. The fix is to make it accountable. My idea might not be practical for reasons I cannot see, but I'm convinced that something similar to it will fix the patent system.
My default browser is Mozilla (on W2K). I do not install Flash on it.
If I come across a site that I absolutely have to see, and it uses Flash, then I cut-and-paste the URL into IE.
Two examples: The Homestarrunner.com site, with the initial FHQWHGADS (fuh-who-goo-gads) email and the song they created as a riff on it. It's hilarious -- watch them both, in order.
"I'm buying you a pizza."
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
There are big problems here. First the Eolas patent covers technologies such as postscript. This despite the fact that the git who filled the thing was told about abundant prior art before the patent was issued. I know he was told because I was one of the people doing the telling.
The real scandal here is that the idiot judge would not allow Microsoft to argue that there was prior art. The jury was instructed to disregard the evidence of Pei Wei that he invented plug ins three years earlier.
I also happen to think that plugins suck. I hate what Javascript has done to a lot of previously usable site. Why did the idiots at netscape invent functions that allow the sender of the content to control my browser? Well yes, they were in the pocket of the content providers and they saw their market niche as being able to add corporate friendly features to the web.
It is a great pity that so few Web companies learned the lesson of Google. In the end its the users that matter.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/