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

This is good but...

[LibrePensador]

If this kind of web-neighbor due diligence was carried out more often, we would not see all these spurious software patents being issued.

Why don't we create an industry funded board whose job is to make sure that silly software patents are no longer awarded? Oh wait... The industry only dislikes SOME software patents, while anyone who cares to look will see that all software patents threaten innovation and are largely anti-competitive because they rig the game in favor of big corporations.

Unfortunately, software patents have become the last hurdle that the proprietary world can throw at the free software movement.

Moglen and Lessig are both very persuasive (If you got a bit of free time, read "Free Culture" by the latter) I hope that upon hearing their arguments European Commission will be wise enough to reconsider its position on software patents.

half-backed, recycled and slopped up to the USPO

[falsemover]

let's face it; software patenting is a rich boys club; or another manifestation of the motto "the one with the most money wins". There are thousands of patents like this; scads of unoriginal montages of half-baked and recycled ideas, cleverly disguised and slopped up to the USPO, and approved, cha ching.
It takes this kind of outrage and political pressure to get one patent reviewed. What chance does the small software company have protecting itself against patents with a lineage of prior art? It's also a positive feedback system; patents breed patents, just look at the crazy exponential explosion of USPO patents over the last five years. And sitting in the middle of the web is the black widow, the USPO, raking in the fees while spending precious little fix the spiraling problem. Once practical answer: maybe register your software company in the Cayman Islands or Vanuatu, or some other such place and take your international profits offshore. Better defensive legal system; and better protection against the system fueled by common-revenue-oriented legislation and wayward lawyers.

Prior art.

[ScouseMouse]

I vaiguely remember that the Amiga OS 3 had an application called Multiview which allowed extensible embedded viewing of almost everything with the correct plugins (Called datatypes if I remember correctly). I dunno if this is the same thing though, but i think it predates the Web completely (Although only by a year or two). Hmm, have to dig out my old Amiga and check.

So, Big Business will make it all better?

[EasyTarget]

Humm, The BBC had a article related to this too, Here, and it scared me since the companies that are lobbying for changes to the Patent regieme are all the existing 'effective monopolies', MS, Cisco, Ebay, etc..

I don't think a patent system re-written by Big-Business is going to be good for anyone other than Big-Business.

The more I think about this, the more I fail to see any answer, only problems. How can a patent system protect the genuinely innovative little guys, whilst preventing the abuses the Big Business will practice in order to protect their market share?