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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Ideas exist outside of time.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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!!!

[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!

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: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

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.

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.