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Microsoft Holds Off on Eolas Patent Changes
Walkiry writes "As reported by Reuters, Microsoft believes the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office might come to the rescue and cancel the patent that was going to force them into changing the behaviour of Internet Explorer. Maybe the Patent Office is finally getting a clue? Or is it Microsoft's long arm? Time will tell..."
This is an import win for common sense and the software industry as a whole.
Let's hope this can become a reference case for defeating further rediculous patents.
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the cancellation of this patent would be a good thing. We can't have these tiny little extornist companies putting a stranglehold on technology and commerce.
Whatever Microsoft is guilty of, I don't recall it using patent violations as a tactic. They have created a lot of wealth for a lot of people. I can't say the same for the patent holders in this case.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Lets face it, you want to think of Microsoft as the bad buy in every lawsuit. Hell, 1/2 of the /.ers around here blame Microsoft for the SCO vs. IBM thing. This really isn't the case with alot of these patent laws. Old patent laws don't apply well to new technology that develops VERY quickly. True progress is going to require a legal system that understand the technology that it governs over.
Right now the internet standard have been set. It doesn't matter what new proposals come out of the W3C or how well other browsers will perfect their implementations, the internet will always be suspended at the greats common denominator (which is, in this case, the functionality of IE 6). No-one in their right mind is going to abandon support for the browser that 90% of potential customers use.
By levelling the playing field a bit more, this would mean that webmasters and designers would not be afraid to move on and leave IE behind. By doing so, Microsoft would be forced to keep up to maintain market share.
However, there is one big caveat - and that is the Eolas doesn't use their win against Microsoft to go after everyone else. This is a pretty big if and definely one that cannot be easily discounted.
If Eolas do decide to follow suit with other browser manufacturers then any "leg up" that has been gained will be lost, IE will still be dominant and the WWW standards will stop. However if Eolas doesn't go after anyone else then this is quite some benifit.
Unfortunately, banking on Eolas winning and not sueing anyone else is just too much of a risk. Which means that, in this case, the best course of action to is come to Microsofts defence, get it overturned and accept that for WWW standard to move on (which will necessitate the removal of IE from the top spot), it must happen in a different way.
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Having worked with intellectual property matters in the technology arena (both patent and trademark), the staggering antiquity of our concepts in protecting the fruits of one's intellectual labors is, well, staggering.
:)
Patents are broken down into small "claims", and a patent can easily have hundreds of these, if not thousands. Even the most ridiculously simple idea gets divided into minute, easily digestible sections. One such section I remember was included to explain the concept of a ZIP code, and how the company filing the patent was NOT the arbiter or owner of that concept, but was using it as a reference within their work, and that this was not a determining factor in their technology (they could have easily used another large-scale locational identifier, such as area code). Hence, their patent could be defensible when someone claimed in court that it was based on technology they had no claaim to ownership of.
But worse, the point of the average patent is not to delineate what it is, but what it's not. If your patent includes as part of its concepts anything which you did not personally conceive of, and which you have not attributed to their original creators, That claim becomes indefensible. Toss out one claim, and the whole patent is invalid. It's a house of cards, and that's how patent attorneys litigate patent cases.
When push comes to shove, Amazon knew exactly what they were doing (certainly, their lawyers did) when they patented "one click", and they did it because a patent is precisely designed to allow the applicant to carve out as massive of a piece of intellectual pie as the patent office deems acceptable. Eolas is doing the same, in a different light, it would appear.
If you can state a case, without prior art being an issue, for patenting Earth, feel free. The rest of us will either have to move, or beat you up you and steal your planet.
In cases like this, where someone else comes up with a basic idea, manages to patent it, then extends their idea to encompass the known universe, perhaps the whole issue of reexamining the validity of the original patent should be considered. It would certainly cut back on the "I invented soil, it's mentioned in my patent" suits.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
Let's be honest here. Throwing out these patents sets the precedent that big boys can bully the patent office into throwing out the patents of the small guys. You don't really beleive that it's going to apply to anyone who doesn't have billions of dollars in the bank, do you?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I would hope to think that Tim Berners-Lee was more significant than Microsoft in fighting this.
After all, if he said it was prior art, then it was prior art.