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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
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 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.
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.
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.