Slashdot Mirror
Argument Held in $565 mil Microsoft Patent Case
Grotius writes "As reported in CNET, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (the court that hears patent appeals) heard oral argument in an appeal from a $565 million award against Microsoft for infringing patent rights held by the University of California and Eolas. The University and Eolas share the rights to a patent that they claim covers plug-ins and applets that are invoked through a Web browser.
The case has broad implications for the internet -- Microsoft could be forced to change Internet Explorer and make it incompatible with some web pages. However, the issue before the court was narrow: Whether Microsoft should have been permitted to present evidence to the jury of prior art in the form of an earlier web browser called Viola created by Pei Wei."
" The school and its spinoff company called Eolas share the rights to a patent that they claim covers plug-ins and applets that are invoked through a Web browser."
It sounds from the article if it would, and I'm sure it's been discussed before - what's the concensus?
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
that we use these things for years and then someone claims they invented it?
...I would think I were a pretty unobservant guy :/
I mean, if people were flying for years and I suddenly looked up and went...OH! look! people have been using my invention for years and I never noticed!
This patent is very broad, I'm sure both opera and firefox violate this shit. Ofcourse the lawyers will only go after the ones with deep pockets. Firefox is safe for now.
... plugins in IE are merely an offshoot of the system developed for Netscape all those years ago. ... applets are of course inventions of Sun.
So is the lawsuit to do with some technical detail in ActiveX?
Surely if can't be for something as vague as "applets and plugins".
As I understand it, the patent involves the plain obvious notion of running active elements inside web pages. But Viola, a number of other technologies, and even discussions of the old WWW mailing list of which Doyle was a part all established prior art efforts of developing this notion before Doyle ever filed his patent.
But the judge in the MS case did not permit effective testimonies to the jury about all this prior art, particularly Viola, based on ridiculous technicalities, essentially exposing himself as a nonrational anti-MS activist. The judge just seemed to be soley focused on sticking it to Microsoft.
But instead what he's done, I believe, is established a precedent where now one man and his team of lawyers get to rape and pillage anyone who has developed some kind of active web page element technology over the past 10 years. This may well include Sun, Macromedia, and Adobe, for example.
Doyle took an obvious idea and has succesfully manipulated the half-witted patent system into netting himself hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's hard work in good faith based on public technology concepts and he's not gonna stop there.
wag more
bark less
In other words, I'm getting screwed anyways, since I don't have money for bogus patents. Nor for non-bogus patents, for that matter.
Not that there is such a thing as a non-bogus software patent. Tell me, people, can one of you come up with a single example of a non-bogus software patent? Like something you'd look at and think "Ah, clever!"?
Because any software patent I had the honor of reading so far was bogus, wicked, money-grabbing, asshole-lawyer enriching, not-worth-paper-it's-printed-on, trivial piece of crap, that any sophomore Comp.Sci. student would come up with in 30 minutes or less. Man, am I upset, or what..
Do you think the Jury system is outdated enough already? Please tell me how 12 or so people picked off the street (figuratively) can honestly make the correct decision about a technical subject this prickly.
Probably Not! (Here's why).
The general trick if you are going for maximum profit is to first sue a small company, and get a successful precident. It costs you less to fight the action against a smaller company, and improves your chances of getting the really big money later by giving you some already recorded findings that the court will generally accept and not let your opponent delay over. Taking on Opera (for example), first, and Microsoft second or later makes more sense if it's all about the cash.
For a publicly traded company, this is even more plausable. Winning a small decision that seems to forshadow a bigger win can really drive up the price of stock without costing much at all to implement.
The chief reason people are concerned that this lawsuit might be the first of a series is probably SCO's lawsuits. After all, SCO avoided going after smaller fry first and went for IBM. However: 1. That doesn't seem to be working too well, and other companies are at least as likely on observing it to avoid the strategy as imitate it. 2. There's no indicators that Eolas has been secretly coached in this strategy, backed by (say) the veiled resources of the powerful Lynx Megacorporation in an attempt to regain browser dominance for Eolas's hidden puppeteer.
Who is John Cabal?
What if the principle of eminent domain were applied to some of these sleeper patents? In cases where IP rights have been unenforced for years and a thing has come into widespread use, the public good should outweigh belated claims of infringement. Alternately, a statute of limitations on infringement would force IP holders to either exercise their rights in a timely fashion or not at all. Products that are on the market for say two years with no infringement claims against them should become immune to such claims. That might make it harder for patent holders to wait in the shadows for somebody else to do all the hard work before snatching a share of the profits.
Because, if his real intent was to give a boost to Mozilla, it would have been done differently. First he'd contact the makers of the browsers he wanted to boost, and offer them a license. It could be for free, you don't have to charge for a license (well actually because of the nature of contracts it would probably be a one time fee of $1 for a perpetual license). With those secured, he'd then go after Microsoft for an injunction, to stop them from distributing a browser with the patented technology.
That would really put MS in a bad spot (supposing the patent wasn't garbage, which it is). The others would have licenses and continue happily, while MS would be barred from distributing IE until they removed the patented feature. They couldn't do anything about it either, you don't have to license to any particular company if you don't want.
No, it's pretty clear his one and only goal is to make himself rich. The open source line is probably just to try and get the OSS people to buy in and help him out.
This is why patent law really needs (among other thigns) a use-it-or-lose-it clause like trademarks. Basically, it should require that when a product comes to market that uses your patented technology that you should reasonably be aware of (meaning it's not brand new or really small or something) you are required to either enforce your patent, or it'll become invalid.
It's stupid that people and companies can get a patent that they have no intention of developing, sit on it when a product comes out, sit on it while that product grows, and just wait until everyone is using it, then suddenly try and extort money. The requirement should be that, if you want to actually use your patent, you have to do so when the product using it starts to come to market, so they person bringing it can decide if they want to pay you, or change their product.
What is to stop Microsoft from hiring a lousy lawyer just so they will lose this case and 500 million but use this case as precedent to go after linux (thru SCO). Afterall MS can afford 1/2 a billion and they would love to get a precedent like you mention.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
I don't see how this would change the internet. Does one really think that users will exchange their "old" browser that supports plugins for an "upgraded" version that does not support plugin? Or will we have a US version of browsers without plugin-support?
The best would be if all software development would legally move to India or so. Then the US can have their own patent-protected internet (and software in general), and the rest of the world can carry on without having to even read this kind of stuff.
BTW now that we're talking about the subject: where did all the talk go about the US elections? I really miss those 5 articles/day about that subject.
At the end of the day the patent war really wont benefit the end user as much as many of the companies claim to thier investors/stock holders. Many software patents really should exist as there is just about no way for the joe-home programmer to know if they are breaching patents the way they are writing code. At the end of the day when you click on the start button in windows or the K icon in KDE does it come up and say.. patent pending or patent xyz... nope.. and really at the end of the day can joe-programmer at home really afford to waste hundreds of hours covering his arse in the long term?. Software patents benefit profits for the big boys in town and the rest of the industry suffers. Both sides have valid arguments and having a good quality license system will benefit everyone if thats the way it has to go.. in the end software patents should be maximum 5years anyway as the industry moves so fast 5years makes or breaks most companies. .
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
Fundamentally HTML 3.0 (ie: highly container based), plus many extensions for richer formatting capabilities. Extensions such as for multiple columns formatting, document insertion (client side), and dynamically collapsable/expandable list.
Sidebar panel: for displaying "meta" information, or for intra document navigational links, etc. The panel is engaged and disengaged by the presence of the document that is associated with the sidebar document.
Dynamic toolbar: document engaged tool applets (ie: navigational aids).
Rudimentary stylesheet mechanism for attaching styling information to a document. For changing document's fonts, color information, alignments.
A scripting language that is accessible from the HTML, such that an HTML document can embbed highly interactive scripts/applets.
Miscellaneous niceties: hotlist facility; shows HTTP loading progress in a pie chart (when it has the information).
An experimental platform. It's source available, even most of the browser is constructed in a highlevel scripting language; and is very customizable to someone who understands the scripting language.
Motif front-end. The X11 (non Motif) version is also available.
Self contained single binary for easy installation, unlike the old ViolaWWW which required setup of various viola application files.
Holly cow! That's for a 1991 app!
The original Eolas browser their work was done in, and distributed with was done in Mosaic. They should lose just on those grounds, since they never licensed Mosaic... and they should have because it was only free for non-commercial use.