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."

Comments

When You think Microsoft is Evil

[nberardi]

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.

Re:When You think Microsoft is Evil

[bigjocker]

Microsoft has already tried to settle out of court, but Eolas' goal is to destroy IE.

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.

Also, Eolas has only one employee, the president and CEO who's leading the suit. It's a one man operation.

Plus: The worst case scenario would be Eolas being bought by Microsoft because the patent would live on in the hands of Microsoft. The best thing can happen is the small fish biting the big one, even if we think is unfair, but for once the big corporations need to be hit by these stupid patents for the system (read: the people that makes the decisions) to move.

This is a Good Thing, a big player is being threatened by the stupid patent system, so there's hope now for changes to be made.

The sad part is all those small players that have been fscked by the system; the decision makers only listen to the big fish.

they claim prior art from MS!

[an_mo]

from the nyt:

In the trial, Microsoft did claim that there was prior art that undermined the claims of the Eolas patent. But in its filing, the Web consortium offers different examples including pre-Internet era software like Write, a word-processing program included with the Windows 3.1 operating system, which included software for summoning and displaying other programs. That, the standards group said, is the same basic function and idea described in the Eolas patent.

It is incredible that MS would forget to use prior art of their own in their own lawsuit!

Prior art

[Sir Haxa1ot]

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.

Patent thoughts

[Empiric]

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.