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W3C Requests Eolas Patent Re-Examination
x0n writes "Verbatim from W3: Acting on the advice of the W3C HTML Patent Advisory Group, W3C has presented the United States Patent and Trademark Office with prior art establishing that US Patent No. 5,838,906 (the '906 patent) is invalid. W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee has written an unprecedented request to U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property James E. Rogan to take action to remove the patent to allow operation of the Web. Read the briefing." techsoldaten adds a link to this New York Times story on the move, and
bgalbs points out the W3C's detailed filing describing prior art provided to the USPTO Director's office, "along with a letter from Tim Berners-Lee asking that the so-called Eolas patent be revoked," writing "Here's hoping it does some good; between this and the Lotus Notes prior art, perhaps there's hope this will all go away."
When you think Microsoft is evil and there is nobody lower, you look at Eols to find that they even sunk below Microsoft. Can't Microsoft just buy Eols and fire all their employees and have this nightmare be over with.
It is incredible that MS would forget to use prior art of their own in their own lawsuit!
Some sources tell me that Microsoft will appeal Eolas case by bringing up Perry Pei-Yuan Wei, a Berkeley student that in 1991 created a browser called Viola capable of rendering the built-in plugged-in applications, later to be knows as applets.
Here's an example of the chess app being used in Viola in 1991, which questions Eolas patent.
Nader-2004
Without "intellectual property," friend, you'd be reading this article on a soot-darkened cave wall.
Stupid patents are not arguments against IP in general. They are arguments against stupid patents. The USPTO is an institution that has repeatedly proven itself incompatible with the notion of common sense. No one -- except lawyers -- would miss the US patent system if it were abolished overnight. But you're throwing out the baby, bathtub, and plumbing with the bathwater.
Call me short-sighted, but I was rather enjoying Eolas going after only Microsoft with patent infringement.
Anything that makes IE harder to use, would make alternative browsers all the more attractive to the inherently stupid lazy average PC user.
Sorry, to be so harsh on them, but it's true. If people sought out the best tool for the job, Microsoft would be out of business.
I'm still rooting for Eolas, and that wont change until they start enforcing their patent on everybody. But for the time being, I am still calling it divine justice.
Glad to hear Tim Berners-Lee is weighing in on this. Certainly, his views should have some impact. I would be seriously annoyed if I were in his position; it's absurd to allow companies just to wait for thousands of inventors and developers to go through the quasi-Darwinian process of technological innovation (often without compensation), see which techniques evolve as best-practices, and then hijack them.
Supposedly, the underlying justification for patents is to encourage investment in research by protecting inventions from direct competition for a limited time. In that context, there should be a requirement for a strong correlation between the time required to create an "invention", and the time frame of the protection. If something takes 5 years of R&D to create, 7 years of patent protection seems reasonable. If it takes 5 minutes, that time frame certainly is not.
Why not, as part of the patent process, have a peer review of the application, with a best-guess among the reviewers as to how long it would take to create the invention or (more approximately) generate the underlying insight, given a person working in that field? Multiply that time by a generosity factor of X, and limit the patent's applicability to that duration, assuming it passes all other prior art tests. It would seem that this would much more closely represent the intent of patent law, as well as eliminating irrational impediments to technological progress.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I believe there is a general assumption that MS really wanted to win the case.
What should be understood is the advantages MS would gain in losing.
Teh fact that prior art itself that was not presented by MS but of MS products, should be plenty reason to suspect MS didn't want to win the case, but only create the illusion.
Perhpas the question to ask now is how is MS using other companies to do their bidding, like SCO..
I don't agree with your analogy.
This patent is the equivalent of everyone using a device to hold the screw, but up until now it has only been used on wood.
Now Eolas comes along and patents the idea of using the screw holding device for use on metal materials.
Same tool, different media, obvious implementation.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Does anyone know of any (software) patents which have been nullified due to prior art?
I will certainly not contend that the patent in question should not have been granted, but your argument is equally as absurd as the Eolas patent. I remember (from research) the Examiners to U.S. Patent 821,393 said almost the exact thing in regard to its claims, and the '393 patent is probably the most important US patent ever issued. Not all intellectual property is the Eolas flavor, and only someone who is entirely ignorant on the subject would contend as much. The USPTO examiners do a difficult job and are correct 99% of the time, and the remaining 1% errors are corrected in litigation by competent and educated (in science, engineering, or compsci) lawyers.
Most large firms have a few lawyers on staff that are paid a flat amount in exactly the same way as a staff programmer or assembly line worker is paid. When legal matters get too complex for staff lawyers, the amount of work is greater than they can handle, or additional expertise is needed outside lawyers will be obtained.
Each company is different. In general [large enough] a company can expect at any given time to have several lawsuits underway, as such it is to their advantage to have a few laywers on staff to handle those cases, in addition to those providing legal advice for other matters (contract review, policy, tax issues, copyrights, patent filing, and so on). However since each lawsuit is different, and the company will often pick up extra lawyers who know one particular area of law that is unneeded for most cases, to handle specific cases.
" Without "intellectual property," friend, you'd be reading this article on a soot-darkened cave wall"
With all due respect, there is no such thing as "intellectual property", there are trademarks, patents, and copyrights.
And for the most part, none of them existed more than a few hundred years ago, with the concept of "IP" existing less than 40 years.
As to the USPTO: Do we need to throw it out? No. Do we need to roll it back by 100 years. Probably.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Actually, IE is free as in lunch. As in, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
To use IE, you have to use Windows. Windows costs money. Ergo, IE costs money (since it's part of the OS, and you cannot get the two seperately). The cost of it is hidden, just like the cost of the free lunch is hidden within the cost of the beers you buy to assuage your sudden thirst, brought on by the extra salt in your free sandwiche and free chips.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
So what happens if the sole employee of Eolas dies: Will he pass on ownership of the patent to other people within his family or give it to business associates? Watch out! Even though Doyle says he won't sue anyone but Microsoft, the inheritors might turn the tables and sue Macromedia for Flash, Sun for applets, and Opera for their web browser, and use SCO's Gestapo tactics against Mozilla.
But this is besides the point. Read the post by Sir Haxa1ot, under the heading "Prior art" on this page, about Pei-Yuan Wei, the UC Berkeley undergraduate who already invented applets in the ViolaWWW browser and demonstrated the concept to Sun Microsystems two to three years before a patent was ever filed. For some reason, the judge in the case NEVER allowed Microsoft to contest the validity of the patent, so Wei was never allowed to testify. That is an injustice, because patents being issued by the Patent Office these days are not actually examined for validity. For example, Patent #6,368,227 (granted in April, 2002), is "A method of swing [sic] on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other." It was originally submitted by a lawyer as a demonstration to his daughter of how the Patent system worked. Imagine his surprise when it was granted! The Patent Office's excuse it that it is swamped with patent applications, and so there is no way it can give each one the attention it deserves; their assumption is that the validity of the patent will be explored thoroughly in any ensuing lawsuits, when plaintiffs and defendants can have the luxury of time and money to fully investigate claims, track down and interview witnesses, and discover the true history behind it all. That's why the judge in the Eolas suit erred, and I hope that the ruling can be appealed.
W3C seems to have an odd inconsistency in its filing:
Raggett I and II specifically teach those of ordinary skill in the art to modify a prior art browser, such as the Mosaic browser, to incorporate the allegedly new features of claims 1-3 and 6-8, rendering those claims obvious.
Then it says this about 'ordinary skill in the art':
The person of ordinary skill in the relevant art to the claimed invention is a software programmer with at least a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and five years of programming experience in Internet, Web and browser technology, including specific experience with programming in HTML.
I can't help but think that if the "new" prior art is dated July 1993 and the first NCSA Mosaic is February 1993 (?), there wasn't anybody around with the requisite "5 years' experience" for the invention to have been obvious to, not even by the time the application gets filed in 1994.
Anyway, I just thought it was strange that they'd make such an effort on this stuff but make that kind of apparent mistake.
Oh, and the internet was developed using US tax payers money, just the way that most early work on computers was done by researchers using public money or working on their own WITHOUT APPLYING FOR PATENTS or otherwise retaining restrictive IP rights. It's quite interesting that you bring up the internet, considering that a large part in the success of the internet is that all specifications for the basic infrastructure are available in the open, and NOT covered by any IP rights that restricts reuse.
Try to guarantee all you want that Intel and Apple wouldn't do years of R&D if their competitors could steal it once they go to market, but the idea is ludicrous. Companies DO steal their ideas as soon as they go to market - patents doesn't stop that. It stops the blanket copying. However who would copy Intels chip designs when they lack the technical capability to manufacture the chips, and when reverse engineering the designs would take them so long the next generation chips would already be out?
And further back in the field what you will see is that sharing of information unecumbered by patents and copyright was what advanced the computing field.
Some IP rights might be warranted - authors of non-bestseller books don't usually make lots of money (unless they're one hell of a negotiator when dealing with their publisher), and many of them might never have gotten written or published if they could have been copied by another publisher right away. In that case not having any IP rights would have been a loss to the public.
But most major scientific advances have not been protected by patents or copyright.
You point to the Polio vaccine, but the "invention" of the vaccine by Salk was often heavily criticized by other researchers as containing nothing new of substance, but being just a result of combining research already in the public domain. And in fact Albert Sabin soon developed a new vaccine that more or less superceded the Salk vaccine. Add to that that the research wasn't done by a private company, but a university and the idea that lack of IP rights would have prevented it gets ridiculous.
TV is perhaps the only area you mentioned where patents had much of an impact, but even there there is little doubt from looking at the history of it that the research would have happened regardless of patent rights - perhaps slower, perhaps faster.
Arkwright's invention was independent, but there was very prior prior art.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Basically, there is a corelation between the invention of patents and the industrial revolution. Whether that corelation is causitive or not I don't know. The original poster seems to believe that it is. And you seem to be arguing that it isn't. But your argument against the causitive nature is pretty weak:
In order to say that it's causitive, yes he has to make the assumption that you stated. But that's alone isn't sufficient to say that it *isn't* causitive. Just strong enough to say that he's assuming it is without proving it.In order for you to make the claim that it's the corelation is definately not causitive, you are assuming that technological progress would have continued w/out patents. This is something that's simply not testable. All we know at this point is that the industrial revolution corelated in time to the use of patents. If you want people to agree with you that there's definately no cause/effect relationship between the two, you're going to have to rely on something stronger than imagining something that can't be tested.
Ok. I understand that you believe this, but you haven't provided any evidence that either of these statements are true. Personally, I agree with you on the 2nd point. But I'm unconvinced on the first point. And here's my logic:Imagine I wrote a book. I spent lots of time and energy thinking about the book, developing the ideas, writing it down, editing it, getting it printed, and then bound into a book. If after doing all of that, anyone could simply take a copy of that work and duplicate it without consequence, I would be less inclined, next time, to write another book. Because someone would figure out how to streamline the process of copying books and selling them. At that point, writers would not be able to compete. They'd simply produce works from which someone else made money. The enormous amount of effort and cost it takes to produce the first copy of a book and publish it would disincent the vast majority of writers from writing, because they'd not even be able to recover their costs before someone else plugged it into their streamlined book copying process.
By having copyright, writers are given an incentive to produce, in that, at the very least, they can recover their costs. The current day implementations of copyright are insane, but the original implementation seems to have produced incentive to write.
Patents are almost exactly the same, except instead of covering books, they cover inventions. And the original implementation required that a sample of the invention be supplied with the patent application. As a consequence, someone who came up with a good idea and went to all of the effort to make it and prove that it worked, would have no incentive to publish that idea if the next guy down the line could simply copy it and sell it before you. Under the original implementation, it at least *seems* like patents rewarded real inventors. Now, I agree with you that the current day implementations have gone overboard and that they can reward people who haven't done a lick of work. But I'm going to need some convincing if I'm to believe what you're suggesting:
- that patents were not causitive of the industrial revolution
- that patents hindered it's progress
I'm not saying you're wrong. I just don't understand how you've come to that conclusion.Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.