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

Indecision 2004

[bm17]

Ah. Decisions, decisions. I just don't know who I want to see get screwed more: Microsoft, or Eolas. I haven't been this perplexed since November 2nd.

Still, I worry that this whole affair is going to cause Microsoft to step up its evil campaign to acquire bogus software patents. Does anyone know where the money goes if Eolas wins?

Viola Author's Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/aboutEolasM icrosoft.html

incompatible

[barista]

Microsoft could be forced to change Internet Explorer and make it incompatible with some web pages

They're presuming it's compatible in the first place.

Re:Would this also affect firefox?

[periol]

This would affect all browsers that use embedded plug-in and applet technology. Opera, Firefox, Netscape, IE - they're all in the same boat. In the past, Eolas has claimed they would only go after Microsoft, in order to give Mozilla a boost, but I'm sure that wouldn't last long.

The sad thing is that the real loser if Eolas wins is the end user. Rather than license the Eolas patent, browsers would most likely switch to an interface of some sort that forces the user to choose to use the plug-in or applet to view a site.

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.