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.

Ideas exist outside of time.

[Thinkit3]

That's why this concept of "prior art" is rediculous. Since any idea can in theory be discovered independently of any other discovery of that idea, all ideas must exist outside of time.

Re:Ideas exist outside of time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unforunately for you, your ideas have prior art dating back to Plato.

Re:Ideas exist outside of time.

[Safety State]

Well, there you have the problem.

We've got so many humans in the world, so many thieving, conniving proletariat brains thinking without corporate oversight, that there's no easy way for the legitimate, financed inventors to make a profit.

Where would we be if you went around willy-nilly using any idea that struck you as useful? I'll tell you: a hellish chaos of untended progress and distributed profit.

Software Patents: Because Extortionists are People Too

Re:Microsoft doesn't want to win this

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, you've completed the reductio. It is proven that the legal advice given on Slashdot is a joke.

Argh!

[Sanity]

...sorry, just temporarily dazzled by the sun reflecting off your tinfoil hat.

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.

No concept of intellectual properties law!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot use e-mails as a prior art! This is because you cannot patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of an idea!

3 people sitting around and talking about something doesn't mean you can't patent it! Whoever creates an implementation of an idea gets the patent.

You need to show a working implementation of something in order for it to be considered prior art.

Re:No concept of intellectual properties law!!!

[kfg]

Except in this case the "implementation" is computer code, a mathmatical algorithm.

In other words, nothing but an idea.

This is the sort of sticky wicket that was opened up by allowing the patenting of algorithms and business plans (again, nothing but an idea. There is no "thing" attached to a business plan).

The idea that you had to show a working implementation died many, many years ago. See the Seldon Patents and the modern allowance of perpetual motion machines. This is the sort of nonsense that ensues when you don't demand a working implementation before granting a patent.

As an exercise for the student I challenge you to demonstrate prior art on the ever popular "Cat Exercise Device," because it is nothing but an idea and one well implemented almost at the instant of the invention of manipulable laser devices.

Emails along the lines of "Hey, my cat goes crazy chasing the laser) will not count. You must demonstrate that the implementation existed at the time.

Prior art on ideas such as this, an idea which is simple, was nearly ubiquitous at the time of filing and relies strictly on the use of an existing item (Hey, I can use a hammer to hit screws too. PATENT that puppy!")is nearly impossible to prove because they are nothing but simple ideas.

And granted patents.

Jefferson got the patent system nearly perfect right out of the box. Since his time the system has slowly become dafter and dafter. In the 1960s it began its slide from merely pretty daft to criminally insane.

KFG

KFG

Re:No concept of intellectual properties law!!!

[AJWM]

You seem to be confusing copyright law and patent law.

You can't copyright an idea, only an expression of that idea. The opposite, however, is true of patents and prior art.

You need to show a working implementation of something in order for it to be considered prior art.

You most certainly do not. The most celebrated counterexample is the rejection of Halcyon's (IIRC) attempts to patent the water bed, because of prior description of something very similar in a Robert A. Heinlein novel.

You merely need to show a description of it sufficient that someone "skilled in the art" could produce it. So to the extent a generic description wouldn't suffice, you're right. But a detailed description, even short of actual implementation, would be enough.

PLATO rocked

[Waffle Iron]

It was like a preview of the World Wide Web, 25 years ahead of the real thing. (It also had email, newsgroup and chat functionality as well). The high-res orange plasma terminals looked cool too, especially the way they drew graphics in a vector-like fashion, like someone drawing a blueprint at high speed. They weren't very bright, so the terminal rooms had to be kept very dark. The low light and orange glow enhanced the atmosphere.

The entry-level physics course had the option of using PLATO for all of the homework. The system could show animated demonstrations of the mechanics problems you had to solve.

It was amazing that they usually got fairly responsive interactive performance even when hundreds of users shared a single mainframe that probably had less power than a 386.

Some of the later plasma terminals had their own microprocessors and could be set to run programs locally. It was good to use those terminals because some of the best games used the local mode. I wonder if downloading these programs on demand to the terminals could be considered a "plug-in".

Re:PLATO rocked

[Geotopia]

Ah, Plato. No one ever talks about it so I always thought it was a local system. I used it when I was at the University of Lethbridge to send email to my brother at the University of Alberta (Edmonton) and to play this awesome (for the time) flight emulation program that was truly the first multiplayer game (of which I have any knowledge). This was back in 1982. Anyone know how many/which other universities had Plato terminals? I do remember the flight emulator getting slower and slower until it was no longer playable - possibly due to more people tying up the main frame. But the vector display rocked! I thought that that was the way to go for graphics.
Later, ('84), I used a logic program on Plato that would allow you to create circuits using NAND gates and JK Flipflops. That was fun but I remember not being able to save my work - at least not locally. Ahhhh, 8-bit nostalgia!

Ever So Sensible

[jefu]

Can't you can patent something without a working implementation?

If so can you get a patent without even having a functional version of something? And then use that patent to quash someone else who produces a working version at the same time but files for a patent a day or two later?

Can you thus patent something without a working version? That is, just patent the general ideas, never bother to actually go though the process of making it work, and use those general ideas to claim fees from someone who does actually make it work.

And you can do this even if the process would be obvious to someone versed in the field?

Yah, this is sane. Reasonable. Logical.

I think the brains behind this are demonstrating a serious need for massive quantities of anti-psychotic drugs.

Oh thats right. Its "Legal".

PLATO and NAPLPS are the real prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

The real prior art for every Internet patent that I've ever seen can be found in PLATO and/or NAPLPS based systems like Telidon. In the Eolas case it is the ability of PLATO to display vidoe disc images on the screen under control of the content sent to the PLATO terminal from the PLATO central server. That is clearly an external application being triggered by the PLATO equivalent of a web page. Yes, the PLATO terminal and videodisc player were hardware but I don't think you can justify a patent by simply implementing a hardware function in software.

And if you compare the WWW with Canada's NAPLPS-based Telidon system circa 1981 then the similarities are eery. Someone really needs to document this stuff properly before we have completely lost all of the NAPLPS systems and software and content. A lot of this was developed in the Ottawa area and members of the tech community there could probably provide leads. But NAPLPS was also the basis of the pre-Internet Prodigy system and Knight-Ridder news had a NAPLPS-based news service. I believe IBM had a lot to do with those two developments.

Two months too late

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately for Berners-Lee, et al., this is at least 2 months two late, since it came out at the trial that the UCSF team demonstrated their stuff onstage at a conferene at Xerox PARC, in mid-November of 1993.

Re:Ever So Sensible - Answers

[servoled]

To answer your questions:

1) Yes, assuming that the patent in question has utility (ie, whether the implemenation that you are attempting to patent could actually work). See 35 USC 101 for patent utility guidlines.

2) Yes

3) Yes (but in the US the patent would go to the person who can prove the earliest invention date. This is not true for the rest of the world, where the first to file would get the patent)

4) Yes, you can patent something without a working version, but the patent can not just be for the general ideas. For example, you can not patent the idea of one-click shopping, but you can patent a specific implemenation for one-click shopping.

5) No, 35 USC 102 and 35 USC 103 lay out the guidlines for what can be patent. An invention can not be granted if it would have been obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art at the time of invention. It is important to note that the obviousness has to be based on the prior art which is already on record somewhere, be it previous patents, products, publications, etc. The basis of obvious is not whether, given the problem at hand, someone of ordinary skill in the art would be able to come up with a solution.

CDC Plato

[djdavetrouble]

I love an opportunity to talk about Plato. For many people the first computer that they loved was their first home computer. Not me, I loved the Plato! These were way ahead of their time, with gui's, touch screens, and multi player games.

I was fortunate to be an 11 year old in berkeley, ca where you could rent time by the hour at the Lawrence Hall of Science on one of 8 or so Plato terminals. The dungeon games were completely amazing for being the first. Years later when the internet came around, I couldnt understand why there were no good dungeon games with first person perspectives. This was 15 years later, and it had already been done, and muds seemed pretty boring in comparison.

Shout out to PLATO users!!!!