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New Prior Art Cited In 2nd Eolas Patent Rejection
theodp writes "To be able to reject the Eolas browser plug-in patent a second time, the USPTO had to add the teachings of G.Toye after Eolas' response prompted the examiner to withdraw his previous finding that was based solely on the teachings of the W3C's Dave Raggett and Tim Berners-Lee. It's unclear where the Toye prior art came from, since the W3C didn't offer it when it asked the PTO to overturn the patent. Also, a newly available document reveals that the W3C's widely-publicized prior art filing, which was hastily made without community input, differed little from an unpublicized filing that was made weeks earlier by attorneys from Microsoft and AOL."
Getting that Eolas ruling overturned is a good thing. I for one am sick and tired of the bloodsuckers grasping patents to block innovation so they can make an easy million of patenting an idea they never implement.
Software patents are bad... when you come up with an idea, and go about developing a large programming project, something is seriously wrong when the legal team does patent research and discovers that all that in house code that was written violates 30 patents.
Something needs to be done... immediately.
Cheers,
James Carr
I'm getting tired of reading about this patent fight in particular. For what? Plug-ins running in a browser. Has anyone up until this point ever heard of OLE in Windows? Its allows one application to work seamlessly in another e.g. a word document in excel, or quicktime in a web browser. Though they are different in many ways, they are the same concept. Plus OLE has been around since windows 3.1.
What a nonsense.
> Software patents are censorship.
And you are a moron.
Software patents, like other patents, provide the creator with limited-time exclusivity on the invention in exchange for **making the information public**.
Whether patentability of software or process inventions should be better regulated, that's another question.
>You shouldn't be stopped from making something because someone else thought of it first.
Nobody is stopped - you can do it while paying patent royalty.
And one can invent a better approach, too.
>Software should be sold on quality not on who gets the patent.
Yeah, right. And the money needed for really serious R&D would come from anonymous "contributors" like you?
Surely you can understand how unfair it is for a programmer to find out that the code he has developed on his own is illegal to publish, just because someone else developed something similar earlier?
It seems to me that the fast pace of software industry practically guarantees that the first to market already gets a serious advantage from being the first.
I would be interested to find out if there are any examples of software R&D that was so expensive that only software patents made it worthwhile?
Software patents, like other patents, provide the creator with limited-time exclusivity on the invention in exchange for **making the information public**
Ah, so we all should be eternally gratefull that people have made the concepts of "one click shopping" and "clicking multiple times" public, rather than keeping this valuable IP a seeeekriiit forever.
Yeah, right. And the money needed for really serious R&D would come from anonymous "contributors" like you?
Ah... you're right, because nobody other than a large meganational corporation could possibly afford the huge research effort that went into the "one click shopping" patent, or the salaries of the phenomenally large numbers of scientists and technicians who devoted decades of thier lives to researching the "multiple clicks" patent.
Nobody is stopped - you can do it while paying patent royalty.
True. In much the same way that nobody is stopped from running a business in mafia territory... they just have to pay the protection money.
>You shouldn't be stopped from making something because someone else thought of it first.
Nobody is stopped - you can do it while paying patent royalty.
There is no system of mandatory licensing in effect that would prohibit a patent owner from seeking unrealistic license fees.
In fact, the patent system is used by the NSA to prevent progress in the field of cryptology for example; patents can be designated "secret" and still be in effect. Their staturory timespan even only kicks in after they've been declassified.
So if you independently invent a means of cryptography, or of code cracking, that has been patented by the NSA, unbeknownst to yourself, they can force you not to implement it, without even telling you what they've patented. And when they get round to telling you, you still have to wait 17 years.
Copyright and patents aren't "ownership rights" or even "monopoly rights" (which implies that you're at least selling something); they're prohibition rights (look ma, no act of congress!).
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Cripes, people, learn the difference between the two. Copyrights and patents aren't the same thing with different terms of expiration.
Nothing you said even approximates a refutation to my claim. Algorithims are not copyrightable today. If they could be, it would be even worse than allowing them to be patented (like they are today).
. I think what the original poster meant was that specific algorithm code should be copyright protected,
If you decide that someone meant something different than what he actually wrote, then don't attack me for disagreeing with his real words.