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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.
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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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
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.
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.
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.
One patent to rule them all, one patent to find them, one patent to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
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.
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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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.
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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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.
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.