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."

Comments

Near criminal abuse of patent system.

[Bifster]

This case is almost totally driven by Doyle and his lawyers, UC is not really pushing this matter.

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.

Re:The enemy of my enemy is my enemy.

[Rsriram]

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.