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New Prior Art Cited In 2nd Eolas Patent Rejection

Posted by timothy on from the do-ya-feel-lucky-punk dept.

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."

3 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. I may hate microsoft, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:I may hate microsoft, but... by Minna+Kirai · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Is just over two months from now immediate enough?

      Are you implying that a Kerry presidency would treat patents any differently?

      Sorry, no. The Rep and Dem parties haven't made any true difference on Intellectual Property law in their platforms. Bills like the Sonny Bono Act get bi-partisan support.

      It's even possible that Democratic politicians would favor Eolas in this case, since the Clinton adminstration demonstrated itself to be anti-Microsoft (relative to the successive Republican leadership, that is). They might be inclined to "rescue a common-inventor from big business"

  2. This is so stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.