Microsoft Confirms IE Changes in Wake of Lawsuit

theodp writes "On Monday, Microsoft verified that it will be making what it calls "modest" changes to Windows and IE to meet the requirements of the jury verdict against it in the Eolas patent infringement case. Microsoft says it will finish making the changes to IE and Windows by early next year and will provide developers that use IE technology with documentation to help them modify their applications, Web pages, and browser plug-ins to work with the new plug-in scheme, which affects all Web pages that use plug-in technologies such as Adobe Reader, Apple QuickTime, Macromedia Flash, RealNetworks RealOne, all versions of Java, and Windows Media Player. A preview of the new user experience shows the user being prompted to confirm loading of each ActiveX control."

Comments

..And the others?

[Locky]

And what about Mozilla? Opera? K-Meleon? Safari?

Is it clear just how much this patent ruling will affect the internet as we know it?

Re:..And the others?

[platypus]

But you can lose patents if you don't inforce them.

No, you're thinking about Trademarks.

Re:..And the others?

[Intosi]

See this pressrelease for more information.

Re:..And the others?

[the_mad_poster]

This is a very good point.

This is probably one of the very few times we'd want to see Microsoft win a case like this. Eolas claims that they're just going after Microsoft, but who's next? They can clobber the living daylights out of all sorts of other people now in a misguided bid to make money on litigation (the New Gold Rush, anyone?).

The door swings both ways: if Microsoft is abusing companies (ok, bad choice - IBM or Amazon might be better) with a ridiculous set of patents, we should be yelling. However, if Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, etc. is being abused by a ridiculous set of patents, we need to yell just as loud.

How does that go... oh yes:

"And when they came for me, there was noone left to speak out for me."

Re:..And the others?

[pirhana]

>This is probably one of the very few times we'd want to see Microsoft win a case like this
Not me ! I want Microsoft to loose this case. If microsoft loose this case, more and more people will become aware of the danger of software patents. Nobody is going to realise the danger of software patents when a handful of Free software projects are affected. This specific case has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of software patents because its microsoft at one end. I wish more and more software lawsuits come up and more and more people become aware of this. There is nothing to be complacent when microsoft or somebody like them win a couple of lawsuits and software patents largly remain.

Re:..And the others?

[Short Circuit]

Not much more...

Apparently, this patent apparently doesn't apply to plugins that run as an extension of the browser, rather than as separate applications.

However, from the way the patent is described, X11 itself might count as prior art, as the X11 protocol constitutes a "bidirectional protocol between the web browser and the application."

Is UNIX cool or what?!

Re:..And the others?

[jwilcox154]

Actually, you can lose a patent, in the case of the
Victor Talking Machine Co. vs. Starr Piano Co. (1922)
the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held the Victor
patent void for lack of invention and for abandonment.

Re:..And the others?

[greenhide]

The problem isn't the law, per se. It's the problems that come up when this sort of law is applied in the same way to software as it is to more physical inventions. If I went in and tried to patent "A method for converting harvested grains to a flour substance", I'd be told that my patent wasn't specific enough. But I could patent "Using text and images for business on the Internet". Actually, I couldn't. PanIP already did that. Many years after the Internet, Amazon and all, were live and kicking. Prior art existed; why in the hell did they get that patent? There need to be technology specialists working in the PTO -- geeks like us who read Slashdot, who are paranoid about infringing on the rights of others and think through before just granting patents on anything to anyone.

In this case, the patent was put into place well before it was being used in actual browsers, so there isn't as much a prior art issue as a specificity issue. Generally, I think that because software can have such a broad application (imagine the hell we would live in if someone had patented the general concept of a database - "a data storage system with efficient retrieval systems" and so on) it is important to make sure that the language of the patent forces a company to work out its own solution to the problem, but doesn't prevent it from an entire branch of technological innovation.

Also, editors -- why isn't "Patents" one of the topics for this story? This is clearly taking place only because patents are being exercised; everybody here is talking about the patents. Listing this story under "Patents" will make sure that if someone is trying to look up or research examples of egregious patents being used as IP weapons (even against such a hated enemy/Slashdot sponsor as Microsoft).

Stimulus:Response

[TopShelf]

While $520 million might be a drop in Microsoft's $40 billion bucket, it's still a big enough factor to warrent a change in practices. Too bad the anti-trust efforts didn't enjoy this level of success...

IE changes

[someguy42]

I, for one, particularly like the idea of being notified before my browser loads an ActiveX control. Sounds to me like a feature that should already be in the browser for security purposes anyway. Yes, I know it's a user changeable option, but honestly, how many "Joe Sixpack" users know the option's there anyway, much less what it means?

Re:IE changes

[Asprin]

Yeah, but the warning dialog is conspicuously missing a "Cancel" button.

...of course, you **could** go into the IE security config and set it to prompt you when loading signed and unsigned controls -- THAT one has a cancel button...

Unexpected.

[3Suns]

Huh, who'da thunk it. I expected MS to buy the Eolas patent, or Eolas itself if necessary, and turn the patent against AOL/Netscape, Opera, and the rest of their competition. They're actually not being vicious bastards in this one...

Re:Unexpected.

[WhiteWolf666]

Eolas didn't let them.

Eolas is a 100% private company. All owned by its 1 employee.

No possibility of a hostile takeover there.

Eolas wasn't willing to sell the patent. I don't remember the article, but the Eolas guy specifically says that he wanted to use his patent to change the landscape of the broswer industry; he talks about allowing other browsers back into the market by only enforcing his patent against Microsoft (and wining a HUGE chunk of change in the process).

Re:Unexpected.

[Darren Winsper]

While I can understand his motive, I'm not fond of it at all. Abusing an over-abused process to get your way is going to encourage other people to do it if you win. Besides, it gives the IE advocates ammo along the lines of "Mozilla only survived because MS was forced to cripple IE".

Law of unintended consequences

[onyxruby]

Law of unintended consequences steps up to the plate. This security enhancement took a half billion dollar patent lawsuit to be brought about. What will bring about the next one be and how much will it cost? Maybe, just maybe, they will someday learn that fluid integration of third party code without user approval is a bad idea?

Oppertunity Knocks

[Malicious]

What I see when I look at this new format, is a whole new era of popup ads. With Microsoft now requiring you to click 'Ok' before you can play a flash game, or watch a video, there will no doubt be an entire genre of popup ads designed to look just like these windows.
Ad ware will run rampant, as users are clicking OK left, right and center.

This wasn't really a Good Thing (tm)

[goldspider]

You're ignoring (probably intentionally) the awful precident this sets in regards to the enforcement of (ridiculous) software patents. Let's recognize what is truly the greater evil here.

Re:Bwa ha ha ha ha! *snicker* BWA HA HA HA HA!

[platypus]

This annoying feature was already present in one form in IE. If you check "don't start ActiveX controls" (or whatever this option was called), the dumb thing pops up a dialog box complaining about how you'll not see this site in it's full beauty because you don't like ActiveX.
For every page, and for every damned control embeded in this page (IIRC, it's a while since I last used IE)

I'm glad the the yes-to-active-x fraction now gets their own piece of the pie ;).

Re:Decisions, decisions.

[NickFitz]

Actually, the dialog shown only allows you to click "OK". Who needs options when you've got Windows :-)

not a security feature :)

[dirtydamo]

I love how Microsoft, after a $500 million lawsuit, finally plans on putting a dialog box in that the user must click through to load an ActiveX control... ...when designing this dialog box, you'd you'd think someone would have mentioned how easy it would be to put a "Yes"/"No" choice in it. Right? Because sometimes users might want to not load controls, for various nefarious reasons we are all aware of. Right? Right???

wrong

They're already working around it!

[rkent]

Ha! From that page: "If the OBJECT element used to load the control contains PARAM elements but none of the PARAM elements specify a source of data external to the current Web page, then the control does not access remote data" and so the user will not be prompted.

I suppose that this is one of the concessions they were required to make: plugin content that "specifies a source of data external to the current page" was probably convered specifically by the patent in question.

But here's the VERY NEXT sentence: "The OBJECT element for an ActiveX control has a new attribute: NOEXTERNALDATA. Specify true for this attribute to indicate that the control does not access remote data and that Internet Explorer should not prompt the user." Notice that this doesn't say "specify this tag and we'll CHECK to see if there's external data." It's basically a way to turn off the prompt, no questions asked.

In fact, the code example directly following specifies a "param url=", which sounds a helluva lot like a "source of external data" to me. Is it just me, or does this directly flout the entire point of the changes? I can't imagine that's an accident... I think MS just said "here, we'll change our default behavior, but we'll let users subvert the change starting now."

Ha!

Other interpretations?

E=0

[edalytical]

If anyone has read Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface" they know that a dialog box that allows only one action has a information theoretic efficiency of 0 (E=0). He was referring to dialog boxes with that at least told the user something important or useful, "Finished searching document" for example. But this takes the cake. E must equal -1 (E=-1) they might as well just have a dialog box with a button and no message at all.

Not quite, read the rest:

[Watts]

The following example shows an OBJECT tag that loads a control without a prompt from Internet Explorer because the NOEXTERNALDATA attribute is set to true. The control does not receive the URL property.

In other words, the control doesn't get that URL parameter, it's just loading the component without a data source.

Is it just me..

[webrunner]

Is it just me or is an alert box with just an OK button completely worthless in this case? All it does is delay loading the control without giving the user the ability to not have it load. The user only has two choices: load the potentially dangerous control, or leave the dialog box on screen. This doesn't solve any of the problems and just adds more headaches to the browsing experience.

Re:Is it just me..

[vidarh]

This is a patent workaround, not a "feature". It's not meant to add value. They might as well make it say "Work around broken paten system? [YES]"

Re:uhg

[lordvdr]

You bring up what could be an unintended benefit to this ruling. Perhaps developers will now stick to more friendly interfaces. I rarely stay long at a company's page that utilizes flash extensively (and almost entirely avoid pages that only use flash (for interface, content, etc.)).

If a visitor goes to the page and nothing comes up but a little notice that says, "Stuff didn't load", they will leave without the company getting its message across. That will encourage the company to have a web page that uses html and jscript and php and whatnot to get there message across and will limit plug-ins to only the content that really needs it.

Additionally, While I use Windows, IIS, etc. I don't use things like ActiveX Controls on web pages. I think there are better ways to go about it. Now, when a company is developing it's great new intranet app, will they use ActiveX Controls and force the employee to load each page twice (and waste MONEY), or will they come up with a newer and/or better way to do the same stuff?

Don't get me wrong, I don't agree w/ this decision, but maybe it will have some unintended benefits.

More so since

[Sycraft-fu]

This guy seems to be doing it for a vendetta, not for money. If it was purely a money thing, the free browsers would have little worry since they aren't good targets. I mean, no point taking someone to court who has no assets, it'll just be a waste of your time and money. Well he's not out for that reason, despite asking lots of money, he's out to cripple Microsoft. Ok, many people here would say that's a good thing (I'd say it's anti-capatalistic, but never mind). However, what happens if he gets a burr up his ass about another browser? Say he decides that Opera is unfair, since it charges money and he thinks all browsers should be no cost. Or maybe he gets in a abr fight with a Mozilla dev and gets mad at Mozilla. Then what? He can again use his patent as a weapon.

However, what he does is really not relivant. The point is that patents should NOT be allowed to be used as weapons by anyone, small or large. The point of a patent, and this is explicitly(*) spelled out, is to provide an inventor some protection so they can make money off an idea in the intrestes of promoting PROGRESS. In other words, you get a time limited right to your idea that people can't infringe on, so you are encouraged to share it with the world to use, and recieve compensation as a result. It isn't so some random guy or corperation that didn't invent shit can play bully with people.

Patent bullying needs to be stopped period.

(*): It's article 1, section 8, clause 8 of the constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

The button wasn't meant to be informative...

[JMZero]

..or useful or good in any real way - but I suppose you already knew that.

I think we'll be seeing more and more of this garbage in the years to come - software coded awkwardly to get around useless patents.

My solution? Cut the time on software/business patents to 3 years. Plenty of time to build a lead based on a valid new idea - very little opportunity to "pre-patent" an obvious idea to extort with later.

Quite right, Eolas are truly a greater evil...

[@madeus]

I quite agree, Eolas are a much worse evil in this instance (though I'm sure they do not seem themselves that way, they no doubt belive they are heros of some kind), I was so disgusted I sent them the following email...

To: info@eolas.com
Date: Tue Oct 07, 2003 03:09:36 PM BST
Subject: Congratulations on your lawsuit

I would like to congratulate you on managing to successfully sue Microsoft and still manage to be seen as a despicable bunch of malevolent malcontents by the public at large (including industry professionals).

By exploiting the US legal and patent system and it's weaknesses (in particular it's notorious inability to deal with technical software cases) and infecting the rest of the world with your insipid patent claim (which is an insult to everybody with any knowledge of browsers, plugins, going as far back as the original inspiration for Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Atkinson's HyperCard) you have made the web a less pleasant experience, and you haven't actually contributed anything new to the concept of software plugins (those of us who remember HyperCards XCMD's are more than aware of that, even if the US patent office and the courts were not).

I'm sure your all convincing yourselves you've 'slain a giant' and that you are trying to re-enforce that opinion among yourselves for your own benefit, even though the rest of the world is largely telling you otherwise, most vocally. I'm sure you will casually disregard the voices you do not wish to hear.

Many people (those working for free in the open source world, as well as plugin developers and commercial software developers and web content maintainers) will now have to spend many man years working on an alternative non-patent-infringing format so they can be sure to remain free from your legal shenanigans. This is time that they could have spent working on other free an open software for the benefit of everyone (or who knows, even at the park, or at home with their families!). Not to mention all the end users that will be effected by this and who will have to now spend time downloading, installing and working around 'fixes' that will be necessary in the wake of your decision to sue.

In your own special way, you have truly made the world a worse place to live in.

Congratulations.

--

The patent system is out of control

[Jotham]

This is ridiculous. Basically the ruling appears to state that:

Plug-ins are OK as long they don't load external data
If they do, microsoft can't load it for you without a prompt
BUT you can document.write it in and avoid the prompt
BUT only if the script is in an external file...

So the key point here seems not to be with plug-ins (which obviously pre-date the patent) but plug-ins using EXTERNAL data...
Now this just doesn't make sense. The HTML standard has ALWAYS supported full urls being used in ALL tag that can get data ie. <img src="http://external.com/image.gif"> In fact the HTML standard was written specifically so that it doesn't care if data is local or not.

So in conclusion, why would Chewbacca live on Endor... this just does not make sense... I rest my case

Did you catch the workaround?

[keytoe]

I haven't seen anybody mention this - but Apple has a page that describes a workaround for this for all you HTML developers out there. I checked it out, and almost spit coffee out my nose when I saw this:

Here's an example of code (a simple tag) that will not function as it did previously when loaded in the changed version of Internet Explorer for Windows:

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5..." ...>
<param name="src" value="sample.mov">
</object>

OK - so far so good. Then they get to this part:

Create and place the external JS file on your site. In this example, call it foo.js. This script needs to document.write the full object/embed tag that was previously in your HTML file:

function InsertSampleMovie()
{
document.write('<object classid="clsid: 02BF25D5..." ...>\n');
document.write('<param name="src" value="sample.mov" />\n');
document.write('</object>\n');
}

I can see where this is going...

Replace each [object], [embed], or [applet]; tag with a call to the appropriate external files as follows:

<script language="JavaScript"type="text/javascript" >InsertSampleMovie();</script>

So- in summary: Writing the code directly in HTML is a violation and will trigger IE to spit the silly dialog box. Having JavaScript (and therefore the browser itself) write the offending code is just kosher. Wow.