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Parties Behind Eolas Patent Reexam Revealed
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."
Why don't we create an industry funded board whose job is to make sure that silly software patents are no longer awarded
/. story about patents, and was referred to PubPat...
I asked the same question a few days ago on another
If only people knew more about these things, and cared about them. As a developer, I despise the fact that the obvious things that I may design/develop to assist my fellow man in using my software have become 'owned' by someone else in order that they may profit.
Patents suck. Period.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It doesn't take "outrage and political pressure" to get a patent reviewed. If you know of invalidating prior art it is fairly simple to request a re-examination. It is also fairly inexpensive if you choose to request reexamination inter partes since it involves only filing a single paper.
But you do have to do some research. Something which most people here are unwilling to do for any purpose other than to rant about the USPTO's inadequacies.
http://www.jolt.unc.edu/vol3/Parker-V3I2.pdf
to ponder the considerable problems in the reexamination system, including the $10,000 fee for proposing it plus considerable legal fees, maybe $10k - $100k +fees for filing it and researching it properly. If you are being asked for $5,000 in licensing fees for violating some frivolous patent it' a tough call. In 2003 the Commissioner ordered only 17 reexaminations of stupid patents. 17. This was somewhat better than 2001 when they only ordered 2. Wake up Commissioner!
Slugging it out in court is not an option for most small software companies as the average patent litigation fee through trial is cited to be 1.2 million.
Happy programming everyone. Maybe, just don't code anything more complicated than a REM statement as it will probably violate a whole bunch of patents.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
It wasn't just web browsers either. Datatypes supported both read/display, & write/save operations. Commercial paint programs for the Amiga were able to make an end-run around the Unisys GIF patent by leaving out GIF support in the main program, but having datatype support. To save as GIF you downloaded an open-source GIF datatype (Unisys didn't attempt to enforce against open source implementations), dropped the class description and the library code in the required directories, and the paint program handled GIF equivalently to the native formats.
Pretty slick, eh?