Parties Behind Eolas Patent Reexam Revealed

theodp writes "While news accounts credited Tim Berners-Lee's mighty pen with triggering the USPTO reexam of the Eolas plug-in patent that could negate a $520+ million judgment against Microsoft, newly released USPTO interview notes suggest the reexam may owe more to an alliance of tech giants who appear to have quietly advanced the same arguments to the USPTO weeks prior to Berners-Lee." See also some previous coverage of the Eolas patent circus, and more below about the USPTO reexam.

theodp continues "According to a 4-27 Interview Summary, the USPTO presented Eolas with a 10-14 letter signed by in-house counsel from Microsoft, AOL and Macromedia, a 10-15 letter from Adobe, and a 10-22 letter from the law firm of Sidley Austin (aka Microsoft's lawyers) in connection with its proposed rejection of Eolas' patent claims. All predated the 10-24 letter from the W3C's counsel as well as Berners-Lee's widely-publicized 10-28 letter, which seems unlikely to have prompted the USPTO's detailed 10-30 Reexam Order. The W3C has repeatedly had no comment when asked if the 'newly cited art' provided in its 10-24 filing had already been supplied earlier to the USPTO by others. UPDATE: In response, the W3C's Danny Weitzner points out that the preceding words are mine and should not be confused with those of a distinguished journalist."

Comments

What, again?

[agoatley]

What, you mean that there's more than one patent the USPTO has wrongly green-lighted?
-Ashton

Ken Brown replies

[shoppa]

See, I told you there was no way that a single guy, in just six months, could write an original operating system (backspace xxxxxxxxx)letter to the US patent office. He clearly pirated his letter from Microsoft's letter! See, Microsft came first! And Linux used the same alphabet as Microsft did! And Microsoft has thousands of lawyers, so how could a single guy do the same thing! In, mind you, just six months!

Panties Behind Eolas Patent Reexam Revealed???

[drfishy]

I can't be the only one that read it that way...

Re:Madness absolute Madness

[amw]

the only fair solution is to limit patients to a maximum life of 2 years

I hope I never end up in your hospital ...