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Eolas vs. Microsoft Verdict Stands, Despite ReExam
theodp writes "A federal judge on Wednesday upheld a jury's $521 million verdict against Microsoft in the high-profile Web browser patent infringement lawsuit, denying Microsoft's motion to suspend a decision until the USPTO completes a reexamination of the patent. Eolas was also awarded prejudgment interest of $45 million. An injunction against future sales of IE that contain technology based on Eolas' patent was also granted, but put on hold pending an appeal."
Now instead of working seamlessly, there will be a pop-up dialog to prompt the user to activate the desired control.
Fuck you, Eolas.
I have been pwned because my
The title of the patent in question (is: "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document".
... "The control is blocked if the script that creates the control is in the same file as the HTML for the Web page. For the control to load without user input, the script must be defined in a function defined outside of the HTML file."
Microsoft are proposing to change IE's behaviour to work around the patent. The new IE will prompt users before loading external embedded objects. This manual invocation circumvents the "automatic" specification in the patent, and thus IE no longer infringes.
The fact that this change will irritate the bejezus out of users has not gone unnoticed. A further clever exploitation of the patent wording is suggested to get around this. From the above link:
"You can prevent Internet Explorer from prompting the user by using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) to load ActiveX controls from script. "
There's more detail, but I think the crux of it is that in order to not infringe, IE must avoid automatically loading external applications. A separate script file on the local server is not "external", so IE is compliant.
The good news is that if Eolas turn their patent spotlight onto the browser projects you mention, the browsers won't have to change much, just like IE hasn't. The bad news is that the onus of work will shift onto site authors. Anyone maintaining a site using embedded objects will have to either re-code or suffer a changed "user experience".
Here's hoping the patent will be proved invalid.
Eolas is talking with members of the Linux and open-source community about the use of its Web browser patent, which is at the heart of its high-profile infringement case against Microsoft, the company's founder said on Wednesday. "We're in discussions with major players in Linux world and working on plan to resolve '906 patent issue with entire Linux community," Eolas Founder Michael Doyle told eWEEK.com, referring in short hand to the full patent's number. "The solution will be supportive of open-source community." Full story.