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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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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.
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
Microsoft has already paid licensing fee's to SCO for this technology!
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.
...typing in the URL you want to go to by hand, every time. Just in case. I really need the toilet but I'm afraid I'll be sued for breach of copyright, by Microsoft, for whatever comes out.
If it works like the courts, the patent office might actually feel the need to work in a regular pattern and rule on things in the same way. If they keep working like this, maybe the bullshit will finaly cut down.
just reminiscing of a time when British Telecom tried to patent the hyperlink... 10 points for ambition though!
serenity now!
I'll believe any kind of bribery or influence long, long before I believe that the patent office has a friggin' clue!
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.
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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They could, if they wanted to. They're in a position to use the Eolas patent to say, "Hey, these software patents are stupid! Let's change the system!"
But will they? Of course not. The stupid patents are stupid to Microsoft only when they prevent Microsoft from writing code. It's true that they haven't been litigating violations of their own patents to date (at least I think that's true) but it does appear that that's all about to change as they resort to bare knuckles tactics with the OSS community; the ridiculous Office XML patent being a good case in point.
I wish I was wrong. But I'm not.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
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!
The word "win" obviously is too close to the trademarked "windows", owned by Microsoft, so no-one else is allowed to do it. They had to win.
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.
And why on earth would you want to give three patents a year for free? To encourage the filing of more frivolous patents?
Or too old to remember DoubleSpace?
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.
I hate things that make my life more difficult.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
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.
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!
Patents can not be on something that is a process
As a process engineer, I can tell you that you will be sinking the chemical industry with that one.
In my plant, we process some natural polymers into various kinds of chemicals - mostly for the oil field. The basics of the chemistry are common knowledge (They appeared in peer-reviewed journals decades ago). The difference between my plant and the plants belonging to the competitors are our PROCESSES, which are patented.
I did an internship in a refinery, and that's an old, mature industry. The only way you are going to stay afloat and make money is by making small process improvements. After we pour money into R&D to find (for example) a better catalyst for a particular set of reactions, or perhaps better reaction conditions for a particular catalyst, we don't particularly want the guy down the road being able to just use the same process without having to pay us a bit to license it. It's only fair; we are the ones who figured it out.
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.
Is this a pro-Microsoft article? Wait, am I on Microsoft's SIDE here?
MY EYES!!! THE BURNING!!! MY EYES!!
In the spirit of Vyvyan from The Young Ones, if one more person mentions the McDonald's coffee lawsuit, I'm going to put his head through a window.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Frankly, unless we get some real patent reform out of this, this will just go to show that you are totally fucked unless you are a Big Player(R).
Perhaps I'm just cynical these days?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
MS is using two obsolete patents it owns in an attempt to club Samba.
MS ever-so-graciously decided to publish their CIFS protocol and license it to anyone EXCEPT OSS projects. (Or as they called them "viral licenses".)
MS is not above using patents to club the competition into submission.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
I'm hoping this is just bad reporting, but if the patent office is granting dubious patents and letting the courts sort them out, perhaps somebody should tell the courts to actually do that.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
That would undermine the social benefit of the patent process: making these processes available for the public to use. In the long run, patents benefit more people than trade secrets do.
And why isn't this a good idea already? Wouldn't it be nice to know what is about to run on a new page you've entered for the first time before it runs?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
First, the time at which they drink it is speculative - not to mention which they don't have a separate drive-thru coffee maker, so the people in the restaurant got the same coffee. Had she drunk it, her injuries would have been far worse. Second, McD's cups and lids are quite defective, making spills nearly guaranteed.
I generally don't agree with these bullshit injury judgements, but that one I do.
It's a well established fact in life that if you spill a hot liquid on yourself then you're going to get burned. A corollarly to this well established fact is that you shouldn't use your legs as a cup holder when hot liquids are concerned.
Actually, nothing meant for consumption by a human should cause THIRD DEGREE BURNS. Again, had she drunk the coffee, she could have suffered near-fatal injuries from INTERNAL third-degree burns.
I mean hell, by your reasoning if someone happened to carry home a jug of bleach on their head and they spilled it in their eyes then Clorox should be sued for all their worth.
You'll also notice that 1) Clorox isn't intended for internal consumption while coffee is and 2) the cap on a bottle of clorox is designed much better than that on a McD's coffee.
Bottom line is, nothing that hot should be given to a human in a car in a cup that's guaranteed to come apart.
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.