Are MS, W3C Barking Up Wrong Prior Art Tree?

theodp writes "CNET reports on how Microsoft and the W3C are spotlighting old technology - Pei Wei's Viola browser and W3C staff member Dave Raggett's HTML+ specification - in an effort to defeat Eolas' Web patent. In his ruling, the Eolas judge agreed that a Wei presentation that included an interactive image of a chessboard came close to prior art, but explained that the late 1994 date of invention excluded it from the ambit of prior art. Perhaps the judge might have ruled differently had he been shown January 1994 correspondence between Tim Berners-Lee, Pei Wei, Dave Raggett, and others in response to a challenge to match the prior art of the interactive, networked games that were operational on the PLATO system in the 70s at the University of Illinois to make it possible to develop browser-based chess games." (Read on for more.)

theodp continues: "If they were up on PLATO history, Microsoft's lawyers could have shown the judge that operational prior art existed two decades earlier than Eolas', Wei's, and Raggett's efforts. Not only that, there are striking similarities between PLATO and Eolas patents. BTW, Eolas patent holder Michael Doyle obtained his degrees from the University of Illinois, where PLATO was developed and widely used."

Comments

Re:Microsoft doesn't want to win this

[SiliconBateman]

"Perhaps the judge might have ruled differently had he been shown January 1994 correspondence between Tim Berners-Lee, Pei Wei, Dave Raggett, and others"

Then why-the-hell was this not presented at the case? If it can be conjoured up short-hand on /. the lawyers are damn incompetant for not making up a good enough reason for it to be presented in the case.

Re:Argh!

[qtp]

Don't be too sure about the unreasonableness of the parent post's theory. The elimination of the Web through patent law would fit nicely into Microsoft's plans for the future of computing.

Bill Gate's proposal about removing the barriers between the desktop and the internet with a distributed and hidden filesystem would be much more attractive to customers if web browsers were to become exhorbatantly expensive due to royalty costs.

The settlement was large ($175 Million, IIRC), but not so large as to be threatening to a company with $50 Billion in available assets.

Enforcement of the Eolas patent is as great a threat to open source as it is Microsoft. Perhaps greater.

Re:Argh!

[fermion]

I really get annoyed when people assume the current way of doing things is the best or only way of doing things. When Amazon got the one-click patent it sucked, but we survived. In the end it was not such a big thing and did not destroy the web. A few firms licensed it, probably to gain the credibility of using 'Amazon' technology, some just ignored it. and other just thought of a different way of doing things. The patent made some lawyers some money, but so does most other things.

The Eolas patent will be the same thing. Humans are very smart and there are many, many ways to skin a cat. Some of them more efficient that the current methodology. Of course, it consumes resources to think of and implement something new, so, Humans being the lazy creatures we are, do not wish to do so unless forced. The patent now forces us to think of something new. The Web is very young as assuming the technology developed thus far is the most efficient or practical is like thinking the teletype, which was a great boon over punch cards, was the best we could possible do.

Re:Argh!

[qtp]

I guess I'm just falling victem to the tendancy to believe that this patent is overly general. Or that the method of embeding or linking an executable in a document to be downloaded and executed on a users computer encompasses much of the potential of sharing content over a network.

I do realize that there are many more possibilities for sharing information and over the network that do not resemble this, and that there may be methods of replicating the user experience that plugins enable without encuontering the methods covered by this patent.

But I do believe, quite confidently, that even though there are "better" methods than the web that are going to be crossing our desktops in the (possibly near) future, the enforcement of the Eolas patent is a threat to much of the current web technology, and that the expirience of the web (and network content publishing) will be much poorer if this patent makes plugins and related methods exorbitantly expensive to implement, deploy, and use.