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Whose Prior Art Filing Triggered Eolas Reexam?

Posted by timothy on from the mysterious-ways dept.

theodp writes "The Eolas patent case history shows another prior art filing was quietly made ten days before the widely-publicized W3C filing and two weeks before Tim Berner-Lee's reexam request. Now Ray Ozzie speculates the earlier filing was one being floated at the time that was jointly signed by a number of other parties who supported W3C member Dave Raggett's prior art, which Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to use in the $521 million Eolas lawsuit. Ozzie also notes that those involved argued for all to stand solidly behind the Raggett prior art and not cite anything else. So who are these other parties, and was it their filing and lobbying that triggered the Eolas reexam?"

4 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Serious Question for L's and IANAL's by SloWave · · Score: 5, Interesting


    How hard is it to file file art papers with the patent office? Does the patent office charge for these filings? Can anyone do it? Maybe it's time to generate some boilerplate filings and start attacking some of these bogus patents out there.

    1. Re:Serious Question for L's and IANAL's by Dashing+Leech · · Score: 5, Interesting
      This is something that irks me. I can understand why filing a patent costs a lot of money. But if a bad patent is granted it should be easy to have it revoked, not $9000+. After all, we're essentially doing the job that the reviewer should have done in the first place.

      Wait, maybe that's the plan. It's like software companies intentionally putting bugs in their programs, then charging you even more to fix them and with upgrades. The patent office gets paid to grant a patent, and then gets paid again to revoke it. It's either sloppy workmanship or intentional deceipt.

      If a bad patent is granted, what can the "little" guy do? The options are to have it reviewed or to violate it and risk have it go to court. Either way, it's expensive.

  2. tkwww perhaps by boutell · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Very early versions of the tkwww browser supported full-scale applets: tk widgets and tcl scripts embedded in HTML. The feature was removed later due to the obvious security concerns, but nobody else had a real security model at the time, either (sigh, it's always the obvious and easy part that somebody patents). Unfortunately I was unable to contact the original author or locate a sufficiently old tarball of tkwww; but perhaps someone else succeeded in doing so. This was definitely available early enough, '93 or early '94.

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  3. Why only the Raggett citation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm not sure I understand the theory that other prior art would,
    apparently, be too confusing for the patent office to handle. It
    doesn't sound like the typical lawyer thing to do (which is to use
    a shotgun approach). This is weird to me, and I would like to understand.