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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..."
I hate MS has much as the next guy, but this Eolas patent is just wrong, especially in light of prior art, which has been discussed here to death on /.
Lets just hope more stupid patents like this get overturned.
sounds a lot like java applets. Is sun going to be targeted as well or is the company just against M$ using the concept of "mini programs". I think the patent should be thrown out because the concept is not anything that is really new just a specific case of an ongoing trend in software.
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i am not trying to be a troll, but isn't it pretty naive to think that there might be finally showing up brain cells in the patent office?
we hear stupid patents getting approved every other day, and now they play the ball into microsofts hands...
it's just another issue of economics forcing a governmental body to it's will... the patent system, already killing the small business in favour of the big 0wner, will widen the gap even more.
or it sets the precedent that ridiculous patents should be thrown out. Guess that never factored into your grand conspiracy though, eh?
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
I am excited to hear this news out of pure self-interest.
The sites I maintain do a lot of video streaming, and I have been having a heck of a time getting everything working optimally with the Javascript workarounds Apple, Macromedia, and others are promoting as the best way to deal with this potential change to IE.
I've been dragging my feet on getting it all figured out. As is typical in the industry these days (or so it seems from what I've read and am myself experiencing), I'm a one-man web shop in my company's IT department, overworked, underpaid, project managing, testing, developing, and it all has to be done right NOW!
All I can say is, if I don't have to mess with this IE workaround stuff for ActiveX, it'd be all right by me.
Not to mention that this is potentially a big win for the Internet as a whole. If one of these idiotic methdology/software patents can suffer a big blow like this, there's hope that they all can!
Is everyone on /. so brainwashed by the anti-patent groupthink here that you can't recognize the real message in this announcement? What this announcement tells us is that Microsoft has been either forced by their customers to keep the infringing technology in Windows or they've concluded that their proposed IE patch actually doesn't avoid infringement. Microsoft's statements concerning the "legal status" are merely spin to redirect attention away from their failure and towards a questionable action by the (recently-resigned) Patent Commissioner.
The circumstances surrounding the Patent Office's reexam are quite fishy. Commissioner Rogan granted the reexam the day after it was requested by Sir Tim. The judge in the case comments on this in his recent ruling:
"One possible reason to believe that the reexamination would not take long is that, according to the Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination policy, the reexamination was triggered by a ?substantial outcry? from the Internet community. The most prominent among the creators of the Web, Sir Timothy Berners- Lee, expressed the view that the PTO had missed clear prior art. Judging from the record before me, it is safe to say that some of the outcry arises from the view of a significant portion of Web experts, including Berners-Lee, that royalties ought not to be paid patented Web innovations. This contingent believes instead that Web invention is for the good of humanity and not the inventor. If this is the true reason for the reexamination, then I doubt the reexamination will take very long."
When the judge refers to "the record before me" he is talking about the facts that the two references that Berners Lee cited to the PTO were both exhibits at the trial and that Dave Raggett, the author of those two references, actually testified at the trial. Raggett's testimony showed that he hadn't even considered "interactive processing" in what he proposed in 1993. For this and other technical insufficiencies, Microsoft chose to drop the Raggett references from the case. The fact that those two references are the best that Berners Lee could come up with doesn't bode well for Microsoft's chances.
The other often-cited "prior art" is the Viola software which Pei Wei claimed anticipated the Eolas invention. The fact is that Wei was asked to demonstrate that software during the trial, and in the process was confronted with the fact that it never actually worked the way he's always claimed it did. Microsoft got caught tring to rig the demo so as to hide this fact. This article gives a colorful description of Wei's failed attempt being exposed on the witness stand.
It's funny how these facts never seem to make it into the Microsoft-controlled press.
Your obviously not familar with the Eolas case.
/.ing at home), but Eolas has no intention of going after anyone BUT Microsoft.
Microsoft knew full well that they were going to be sued regarding this patent.
The professor (the sole employee of Eolas) in this situation was working with Microsoft to develop a 'plugin' archietecture for IE. Part of this work became ActiveX.
The man in question was unable to negotiate a deal with Microsoft. They felt that his demands were too large.
So they blew him off, like many other companies that they have cooperated with in the past.
Unfortunately for them, he had been awarded a patent for his research.
Now he has a bone to pick with Microsoft. I'm not sure where I filed the link (I'm at work, and I do most of my
And Eolas has no intention of licensing the patent to Microsoft, at ANY price---
He specifically stated that he would like to see the Mozilla project+Netscape+Others have a 'leg up' on Microsoft.
Anyways, just my 2 cents.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
(Standard disclaimer first -- long-time Linux enthusiast, make my living writing Linux software, Bill Gates is the anti-christ of the computing world, Tux is way cuter than Clippy, etc etc etc. ;-)
Unless I'm misreading things, the Office 2003 XML Reference Schema Patent License you linked to does not prevent OSS projects from maintaining file compatability, but instead explicitly grants a royalty-free license for projects to use the Office 2003 schema, provided that:
IANAL (should've put that in the disclaimer section ;-), but which part of Microsoft's license terms would completely preclude an OSS project from supporting the Office 2003 XML Schema?
Since the MS license is royalty-free, I don't see how this would prohibit a project from including schema support while using, for example, a GPL license. (Certainly if the MS license were not royalty-free, then you wouldn't be able to use a GPL license for the project. The GPL is quite clear about non-royalty-free licenses -- see Section 7.)
I'm definitely not familiar with the other OSS licenses like BSD/MIT, and how they handle patent licensing. Rather than blindly guessing, I'll ask that someone more familiar with other licenses discuss how these work (or don't work) with the MS license terms.
In any case, I'm not trying to claim that the MS license is compatible with all OSS licenses, just that I believe it isn't incompatible with at least one OSS license.
Of course, if someone could point out where the GPL would be incompatible with MS's license terms, I'd also be interested in learning where my understanding is erroneous.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
From the article: "Microsoft has asserted that the patent was invalid due to preexisting inventions, but the court refused to let the jury consider the "prior art," or comparable previous technology."
That's scary. A crit of the patent office has been that they issue patents without adequate investigation expecting problems to be sorted out later in court. But what happens when the courts don't even allow consideration of prior art!
The USPTO knows which side their bread is buttered on. They are a profit center which earns it's bread by issuing patents. They don't gain anything by denying patents. (This is, I believe, one of Regan's "reform"s.)
The result was predicted ahead of time, and has come to pass. You could probably be issued a patent on round wheels, and they'd leave the courts to sort it out. But when a powerful company exerts political muscle, they bend. They are under the juristiction of politically appointed officials, and those officials have the last word whenever they want to. So all you need to do, is cause them to want to.
Corruption? How can you call this corruption. Every action that anyone takes is legal under the laws... that people in their position have caused to be written and passed.
N.B.: This is independant of what party is in charge. This is the result of the design of the system. If you want to change it, you need to change the design of the system. To me it seems that the USPTO has, over the decades, become so unjust and otherwise disfunctional that the best choice would be to just revoke it completely and start over. The ONLY feature that I have identified as worth keeping is the relatively short life span of patents. There may possibly be other good features, but I don't know what they could be, certainly not their method of searching for prior art, and certainly not the extra specially expensive court for contesting patent claims.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.