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.

This is absurd

[Arker]

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.

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.

Lets show our support for this

[arvindn]

Is there an official forum through which we can show our support for W3C's action? Just like "if you don't believe in free speech for you enemies, you don't believe in it at all", the real test of whether we believe that software patents shouldn't exist is when it affects not us but those whom we despise (in this case MS).

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.

Re:so ?

[Dun Malg]

2 stories ago, we wished Microsoft would be punished for firing a blogger, no we wish they'd stop being sued by Eolas... Thanks Slashdot, but I'm confused, now.

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.

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.

Re:so ?

[Dun Malg]

So what are the missing blocks that you do not list, or is this one of those unfathomable myseries of life?

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...

Re:so ?

[the_mad_poster]

Patents and copyrights aren't bad, the abuses of them are.

Oh, wait. That's Block 0: the rational individual block.

Re:so ?

[tarquin_fim_bim]

O.K. but I suggest the use of the word bloc instead, it has a more sinister conspiratorial ring to it.

Try "Day the Universe Changed"

[coyote-san]

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.

Re:What else happened in the 1700's?

[_xeno_]

Actually, suggesting that patents encouraged the Industrial Revolution is rather amusing to me, considering I live near a city that basically flourished by breaking them.

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:

After independence there were a number of unsuccessful attempts to establish textile factories. Americans needed access to the British industrial innovations, but England had passed laws forbidding the export of machinery or the emigration of those who could operate it. Nevertheless it was an English immigrant, Samuel Slater, who finally introduced British cotton technology to America.

Slater had worked his way up from apprentice to overseer in an English factory using the Arkwright system. Drawn by American bounties for the introduction of textile technology, he passed as a farmer and sailed for America with details of the Arkwright water frame committed to memory. In December 1790, working for mill owner Moses Brown, he started up the first permanent American cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Employing a workforce of nine children between the ages of 7 and 12, Slater successfully mechanized the carding and spinning processes.

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.