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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.
In case you're saying "Eolas? Wasn't he in Lord of the Rings or something?"
Here's a little background reading.
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There should be no need for prior art. The very idea that you can patent the idea of putting something that used to appear in a new window embedded in the original window instead is just absurd beyond belief. A wonderful example of what nonsense the entire idea of 'intellectual property' is.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It is incredible that MS would forget to use prior art of their own in their own lawsuit!
> 2 stories ago, we wished Microsoft would be punished for firing a blogger, no we wish they'd stop being sued by Eolas...
Insightful? Another fine example of slashdot moderating...
The patent has implications for ALL browsers. If Eolas thought they could extract money from the Mozilla foundation, you can be sure their lawyers would advising them to take such action.
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
>Eolas have no problems with open source and W3C compliant commercial browsers.
For now... What happens when a few years down the road, the guy running Eolas decides he wants a new jet or yacht? Maybe he just wants to see how much he can get his net worth up to. Who knows what he's planning or thinking.
He's already shown his stance on IP patents, I have no doubts that suing other browser companies is not that far off, regardless of what he says.
The linux hacker
For example, the mozilla foundation in its official statement on the issue says nothing to condemn the Eolas patent, but instead has some content free statements like "The Eolas matter highlights the degree to which web browser software is critical to the user experience of the web.". I don't think this is the right thing to do. Getting all up in arms about say the gif patent and pretending you didn't notice when MS is hit is not good. So let us speak with one voice, and show our support for W3C.
What would happen if the patent did get revoked? Would MS get their money back?
What, you think that MS just wrote out a check for half a billion dollars as they walked out of the court room?
The ruling has been appealed. If the patent was revoked then the appellate court would simply reverse the ruling on the basis of the patent being invalid and MS wouldn't have to cough up a nickel (except to their lawyers).
While the patent in question is questionable at best, how is Eolas evil? They filed for and were given a patent. They have now successfully defended that patent against an infringer.
The fact that said infringer is huge and has decided to unilaterally shaft the Web in order to avoid paying licensing fees has nothing to do with the inherent goodness or evilness of Eolas.
BTW, Eolas is privately owned with only one employee. MS can't buy it unless Eolas agrees to being bought. Also, if MS were to buy Eolas you think they'd just suddenly go and license that patent to everyone out of the goodness of their heart?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Microsoft bad.
Software patents bad.
Poetic Justice?!?
Remember, it could just as easily have been the Mozilla or Konquerer developers being sued, (legally speaking), in which case the folks in this forum would be all up in arms about it and supporting the W3C.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
It helps if you stop and realize that /. isn't a single, monolithic block of identically programmed robots.
In reality, it is a collection of pehaps a half-dozen different monolithic blocks of identically programmed robots. The "punish MS" group is Block 1. The "patents bad" group is Block 4.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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 hadn't really thought about it, but off the top of my head:
Block 1 - "MS bad"
Block 2 - "Linux/OSS rulez!"
Block 3 - "Capitalist/government Conspiracy!"
Block 4 - "Patents/copyrights bad"
Block 5 - "redundant jokes" (soviet russia, beowulf cluster, etc)
Block 6 - "contrarians" (they automatically believe the opposite of the other 5 blocks)
I suppose there are more, but those are the ones the occur to me as I write...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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..
The patent office cost the companies of this country an enormous amount of money that they had to spend on researching this problem. The patent office was responsible for maintaining the validity of the Patent information. The Patent Office should have to pay the companies that endured an unecessary loss to their business as a result of the poor work done by the Patent Office when it originally issued the Patent.
If the Patent Office had to Pay For Their Mistakes, they might be less likely to make the same mistakes over and over again.
Does anyone know of any (software) patents which have been nullified due to prior art?
Nonsense. 'Intellectual property' is a very, very recent invention. It was a radical new idea in the 1700s, ignored by most nations, including many of the more prosperous ones, and where it did exist it had a much milder form than today. What we call 'IP' today really hasn't existed until just a few years ago. I suppose we were all cave dwellers before that? Bull.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.
Really? I think the term "intellectual property" was not even coined until looong after humans left the caves. Unless you mean, not the term itself but the concept of "intellectual property"? On that too I would dispute you; even in modern law there is no such overall concept, and in my experience (I am a postdoctorial research fellow in theoretical physics) the whole notion of "intellectual property" is anti-intellectual and only slows down progress.
Patents and copyrights aren't bad, the abuses of them are.
Oh, wait. That's Block 0: the rational individual block.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
O.K. but I suggest the use of the word bloc instead, it has a more sinister conspiratorial ring to it.
" 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
You're assuming that technological progress would have stopped at that point, all over the world, just because the handful of countries that introduced relatively mild copyright and patent laws at this time did otherwise? That's a huge an unwarranted assumption, and/or a a circular argument.
If anything, the bulk affect of these laws is to stifle progress, not to help it. Particularly with the current 'modern' implementations of these ideas.
No, you need to back up and figure out where you got lost. The notion that human inventiveness would suddenly cease if people couldn't lay legal claim to ideas is absolutely absurd.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Me enemy's enemy's friend's enemy's friend is .. oh shit, I give up.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
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.
So...
/. And since x^0=1, it follows that there is only one rational individual here.
Block 0 - "Rational Individual"
Block 1 - "MS bad"
Block 2 - "Linux/OSS rulez!"
Block 3 - "Capitalist/government Conspiracy!"
Block 4 - "Patents/copyrights bad"
Block 5 - "redundant jokes" (soviet russia, beowulf cluster, etc)
Block 6 - "contrarians" (they automatically believe the opposite of the other 5 blocks)
It seems that the blocks are numbered by their exponential order. Block 6 obviously has the highest population on
Mathematical proof! I knew it!
Naw, it is not a 'Microsoft' thing, it is a 'right vs wrong' thing.
Microsoft is wrong to use its monopoly position in desktop OSs to further its market share in other areas.
Microsoft is wrong to fire someone for posting an innocent picture on an obscure weblog.
Eolas is wrong to try to enforce an invalid patent.
In soviet Russia, Natalie Portman is wrong to have a Beowulf cluster of grits for profit!
SCO is wrong to keep smoking that stuff and not sharing...
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
I suggest you read/watch James Burke's excellent series "The Day the Universe Changed," his other industrial history series whose name escapes me at the moment, or old columns in Scientific American.
History shows us exactly what happens when patent law (and presumably trademark and copyright law) serves the "owner" alone, not society as a whole. You clearly don't know that Britain had 100-year patents for a while... and she made no significant contribution to chemistry or industrial processes during that time. Like copyright today a person could not extend on a process developed on the day of their birth - they and their children (and even many of their grandchildren) would be dead long before the patent expired.
Meanwhile other countries, notably Germany, refused to respect the terms of British patents and had short patent durations themselves. If something was developed on the day you became an apprentice, you could probably use it as a journeyman and could certainly extend it as a master.
Germany industry flourished, and a backwards agrarian society became an industrial powerhouse that far exceeded the capabilities of the British industry they 'stole' from within a working lifetime. The US followed a similar path, although it's not quite as striking here since we didn't break a centuries-old pattern.
History is unambiguous on this question. Terms short enough to fit several consecutive patents into a working lifetime promote progress and innovation. Terms longer than a working lifetime stop innovation in its tracks and serve no useful purpose to society. They do, however, allow lazy CEOs to freeze the marketplace with them on top, and since the marketplace is frozen you see prices jacked up with none of the money "wasted" on research or innovation.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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.
The only block that doesn't hate SCO is 6. Otherwise, slashdoters have put aside their differences and united to hate SCO.
Lowell, Massachusetts is famous (well, was famous) as being a very important and large milling city in America. But before it could become a large milling city, the industrial era mills needed to be invented. They were orginally invented in England, where they were patented. From the Lowell National Historical Park Handbook, specifically, Early American Manufactoring:
The United States as an industrial power was basically established through patent infringement. The patent system was designed based on the idea of convincing people to share their ideas. Protecting them is a means to an end. However, when you have patents protecting frivolous inventions (once you have dynamically linked libraries, plugins are a fairly obvious next step), the system becomes abused. It no longer promotes the sharing of ideas and the development of new ones, it instead restricts innovation.
Who knows if patents as they currently exist really do spur on invention? But patents as they existed during the Industrial Revolution almost kept America out of the game until someone "stole" the designs for mills, at which point the flood gates opened and America became industrialized.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Arkwright's invention was independent, but there was very prior prior art.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
You must be bloc(k) 6.
If the Patent Office had to Pay For Their Mistakes, they might be less likely to make the same mistakes over and over again.
That presumes the Patent Office would feel a greater sense of accountability for your money than they do for their work. Since they obviously don't give half a damn about their work, why would they care about how they spend your money?
What is the benefit of keeping the patent system versus the benefit of getting rid of it? Maybe we need to wipe our hands clean of the whole concept of patenting.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
"You must be bloc(k) 6."
I must disagree.
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.