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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.
microsoft wouldn't crash and burn for this, they've got plenty cash to buy top lawyers to defend them.
We should be grateful that this protects other browsers - because that's who Eolas will be after next.
Stemmo
Yes, because no matter how ridiculous the lawsuit is, if it's against someone you don't like, it's perfectly fine!
-- Dr. Eldarion --
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...
Keep in mind, that if Microsoft is screwed over with abuse of a patent, you might be next.
Same thing with the abuse of any right or law. Keep in mind when the law is abused or a right trampled on, even for a good cause, the next time it may not be a good cause or it could be you that is being abused.
Fight Spammers!
"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"
He really needs to get laid.
Only in a limited number of circumstances would a case be re-opened to present newly discovered evidence. The fact finding stage of this case is over. I doubt this information will be of any use now.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
One thing good about this entire issue of Eola patent is that it is likely to expose the danger of software patents and more people would become aware of it. Since microsoft, not any free software project is the victim, even PHBs would find it easy to understand
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
He has valid licenses for DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11 and Excel! Otherwise, he could be in some trouble with Microsoft.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't like a lot of what Microsoft does and that I have issues with a lot of their software, particularly Internet Explorer. With that said... this is very much a good thing.
Eolas could easily proceed to sue the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, and anyone else who writes a browser with plugin technologies. That would be devastating for developers, users, and web designers. The News.com article linked in one of the previous articles on this topic points out that not only would the browser have to be revised, but far too many web pages as well.
Would I like to see Microsoft set back a bit, or at least forced to mess with IE some? Yeah. But this is a case that would affect all of us negatively, not just Microsoft. We owe Ray Ozzie some thanks for bringing this to light.
Mark Erikson
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.
People are going to mod you (and probably me) down as being flamebait, but I was surprised at the outrage surrounding this lawsuit.
Plugins have made browsers worse, rather than better. Some sites are unusable WITHOUT having Flash. That's not the way we should be going. Accessibility, backwards compatability, and speed, are all important issues. Demanding people use Flash doesn't help with that. Slashdot recently linked to a hardware site that used Flash for its benchmark graphs.. no animation there, just blatantly unnecessary use of Flash.
Plugins encourage people to just throw plugins into their old crappy non-standards compliant browser rather than get a new one. There are people using Netscape 4 with Flash who are still perfectly happy.. they're like the elderly drivers in their 30 year old 'danger on the road' Chevys.
Plugins are like offering 'plugin upgrades' for cars. When your car gets slow, plug in a 'turbo' upgrade.. sure, it makes the car fast again, but your engine was busted up anyway, and you should just get a new one.
Without plugins we can rely on more integral browser support for proper standards like SVG, CSS, and the DOM.
You might argue that Flash is an open standard, but it's not. Macromedia updates it at such a fast pace that new features and methods are thrown in every few months. And, worse, Macromedia's Flash plugins and player take over 99.9% of the Flash playing marketplace.. meaning you're forced to follow their standard.
Let's kill all these plugins, and have support for open standards within the browser. If SVG, DOM, and CSS2 were implemented fully and perfectly, we wouldn't need proprietary formats like Flash at all, and accessibility would be improved.
Even though the fact-finding portion of the case is over, these facts may be admissible in a new case when Eolas goes after the next guy.
As a result, MS may still have to pay the $500M, but Mozilla et al may be spared from similar judgement. Sadly this could go to court and could be expensive if Eolas wants to pursue it with others... has anyone from the OSS browser community contacted Eolas? As others have suggested, they might be amenable to licensing it to that community and then a court proceeding might be avoidable altogether.
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you have questions about this, please email me at tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
The whole patent was based around the idea of plugins. His methodology was to build a plugin, exactly as described in the patent, that fits into Notes architecture. He didn't modify the Notes base-code at all. This is perfectly legitimate.
Did you read the article? And the patent in question? We're not talking about the potential to implement something, but something that was used quite often. And we're not talking about building blocks, low-level code, or "statements". Maybe you should go back and read the article over again.
While I have no love for Microsoft, this will be a good thing if it results in the defeat of this patent suit.
Software patents have the potential for destroying the software industry.
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that you couldn't patent an Algorithm, it had to be a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter." But then in 1981, they sort of reversed themselves to allow patent protection for algorithms that were part of a patented process.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
Software patents could push the price of everyday software, even Open Source software, to astronomical levels. You think the SCO situation is bad? Imagine if all those ancient IBM, Burroughs, DEC, Sperry, NTT, AT&T, etc, patents got dug up and enforced. Try writing software without using some of the algorithms that were developed from the 1930s and on. But, on the other hand, imagine if those companies (or the companies who now own the rights to their work) were to use all that prior art to clobber companies like SCO or Eolas who want to scorch, burn, and pillage.
StdDisclaimer: I am not a patent attorney, lawyer, or legal professional. These are opinions and facts as I understand them.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I don't think this is the right thing to be attacking Microsoft for.
Ray Ozzie's a bright man. He might be a bit too much into bed with Microsoft for my tastes, but he can see how Eolas getting its way here is a B-A-D thing. It'd be like someone holding a patent on HTML.
>copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay,
Does that mean that Microsoft did refuse to send any free copy of an obsolete software to anybody who may spare them half a billion dollars?!
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
AC comments get piped to
What? He did exactly what the patent claimed, with a stock version of Notes using the features the way they were advertised. He didn't do any programming here, unless you call writing HTML (or its equivalent in Notes) programming. If you do, then the patent has *never* been implemented without the user doing programming.
He did the equivalent of writing a web page that required a plug in and showing that it worked. You would have to do the same with IE to prove it infringed the patent.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
For a good summary of the case, check out this page. Read the whole thing for a good summary of all the mitigating facts that make this a totally non-frivolous lawsuit.
..wayne..
That is exactly what he did:
and from Mr. Ozzie's article:
I strongly dislike software patents (I dislike patents, period), but that's no excuse to be sloppy in attacking one.
I too dislike sloppy refutation of unfair claims, although I don't believe in the "baby out w/bathwater" school of dealing with the current patent crisis (it is a crisis), and as long as I'm dealing in cliche's today, I also think that one should follow one's own advice.
Read, L
From the article:
These documents, applications and solutions are hosed on a server analogous to today's "Web application servers".
That's a true assessment of Lotus Notes if I ever saw one.
The only good thing about such patents is that they expire in 20 years, and you only have 1 year after you publish the idea to apply for a patent. So ancient stuff is fortunately rulled out.
The Raven
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
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.
But what's wrong with reading PDF files in the Acrobat viewer externally from the browser? If you download an MP3 from the Web, you don't really want it playing in your browser, you want it over in Winamp (or whatever you use). Ditto for PDF. A Web browser isn't meant to be an 'everything browser', no matter what Microsoft thinks.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
It's a shame not everybody sees it that way. Try to read this story in the mindset of a litigious businessman instead of a programmer for a minute, however, and the first thing you'll think is no longer "Thank God Eolas will be challenged on this" but rather "Ray Ozzie should have filed the patent instead so he could have earned half a billion dollars!"
No matter how obvious or broad a new idea is, somebody has to be the first to think of it, and whomever does has a chance to patent it, milk it for cash, and incidentally set the progress of software back 20 years in the process. Litigious individuals have a huge advantage over actual productive inventors in this process, too, because they can simply give a vague description of the idea while a productive person would be "wasting time" implementing it.
It's not that I don't think there should be any intellectual property laws surrouding software, just that the laws are sufficient without patents getting involved. You can't copyright a design for a particular gearbox or drill bit, so you have to patent it. And, once you've done so, your competitors are just prevented from copying that particular part, not from "using gears to transmit torque" or "drilling to reach oil". With software patents (at least of the egregious kind we see on Slashdot) nobody seems to care if the patent application is so unspecific or obvious that it wouldn't help anyone else to solve the problem at hadn, or even if it is so broad as to prevent people from solving related problems. I'm not sure why, either. Is it because mechanical engineering is so much older than software engineering that everything obvious has prior art which predates the current patent system? Is it because mechanical engineering seems more accessible to laymen and lawyers who are thus better equipped to throw the obvious ideas out?
The situation may well be like the electronics industry in the 1950s and 1960s -- a few large corporations with extensive circuit patent portfolios built all the electronic devices, and avoided patent lawsuits by cross-licensing the portfolios back and forth. But little guys without a portfolio were effectively locked out. They couldn't afford to license the patented circuits they needed individually.
If this becomes the established practice, Microsoft and IBM and Sun and a few other companies will be able to write software "legally", but no one else will. I believe that RMS has written repeatedly that software patents have the potential to destroy the open-source software community.
Taken in another context, it's a bit like saying
If we dismiss the travesty that Eolas is trying to get away with because the victims are Microsoft and plug-ins, don't come bitching to me when you get sued off your ass for using a JPEG or GIF on your website.
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.
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
Link to Townsend, Townsend and Crew website. These are also the guys who went up against Microsoft in the class action lawsuit in California.
Maybe it's the law firm who wants to tackle Microsoft more than Doyle. Food for thought?
^_^
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
But why do you need plugins for that? I have my browsers configured to launch xpdf for pdf files (I could do the same thing with acroread, but I like xpdf better, and I have fewer problems printing with it). And conversely I have xpdf setup to launch a browser window when I click a link. I don't see why a plugin is necessary.
Funny you like PDF viewer to be a plugin. I'd much prefer PDFs be opened in a separate application according to it's MIME type, so that I have access to all the menu items, toolbar buttons, and can resize it independent of the browser window.
Obviously it won't help you see pages what REQUIRE you to use Flash, but if you use MSIE and don't wanna see all those Flash commercials all over the place, this bit will prevent Flash from loading.
e t Explorer0 00}
;)
tart regedit, find
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Software
Microsoft
Intern
ActiveX Compatibility
{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540
And add as a dword:
"Compatibility Flags"= 1024
This sets the "Kill bit" for Flash, meaning that MSIE won't install it if it isn't installed, and wont load it if it already is installed.
(if you don't have the {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000} bit, then add it - but be sure to get all the numbers right. One digit wrong and you are casting a curse on something else)
If you don't trust the magic of others, don't click the button Luke *G*
Usual caveats reply; if you machine blows up, your harddrive fries, your wife leaves you... tough luck buddy
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Why does everyone have to incessantly shout
IANAL
IANAL
IANAL
over and fucking over again? Yes, we know that you are one of, I don't know, 5 and a half billion NONLAWYERS.
Christ, do people who sit around in the pub aruging politics and football routinely interject:
By the way guys, you might not want to listen to what I have to say next because--crap!--I just realized, I'm not a lawyer.
No, they don't. Now, will you people quit it already?. It is perfectly acceptable to make an observation without being a lawyer--if you're wrong, someone who knows better will inform you.
This meme, much like the people who use the word meme, ought to be shot.
Thank you and goodnight,
Anonymous Coward.
Tell me we wouldn't do a better job than the patent office...