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Retrial Slated for Microsoft v. Eolas
wwphx writes "Back to trial they go. Microsoft won a decision stating that evidence of a prior browser, Viola, was excluded from the previous trial." From the article: "It had also suggested that Mike Doyle, Eolas' founder and a former UC researcher, had intentionally concealed his knowledge of Viola when filing the patent claim." Commentary also available from Forbes and ZDNet.
Appeals Court Sends Eolas Case Back For New Trial
Wait... WHO decided it would be a good idea to retry Micro$oft during the Bush administration?!?
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/02/21 5205&tid=123&tid=113&tid=155&tid=17
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Then sue slashdot. ???? Profit!!!
This is the second major victory for Microsoft in two days. Slashdot didn't pick up the story but yesterday M$ won a pretty large appeal in the 9th circuit which dealt with patent and license issues having to do with ActiveX. While we all know ActiveX is terrible and its usuage has created one of the larger security holes known to man the victory is still a bad one because of the message that it sends to the lower courts. That issues involved a plug in developers access to APIs and whether they were allowed to create whatever they want. It is very legal jargon heavy and hard to summeraize the real implications, thats why I think it recieved such little press. The big suprise is that this happend in the 9th circuit where they are normally very friendly to the common man. The bottom line is that M$ is on a winning streak and we need to cross our fingers in the hopes that some judge is brave enough to step up against them.
Be better in bed. Wikiafterdark!
Copyrights and patents don't become invalid due to non-enforcement. Trademarks, however, can be lost if the trademarked term passes into common use and the owner doesn't do anything about it.
How are they (Microsoft) abusing the legal system in this case? They're the plaintiff! Eolas is in the wrong on this one!
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Too bad Eolas is the company suing Microsoft, and not vice versa.
well, sure, that's good and all, except this is the opposite case. Here, MS is being sued by Eolas and the University of California system for violations of a patent that might be invalid because of prior art. if we're going to knee-jerk, we might as well argue the correct direction and fine Eolas / UC for abusing the patent and legal system.
Uhhh, do you have the slightest idea what this case is about?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Welcome to the home of the Viola world wide web hypermedia toolkit. The original Xwindows, independent, experimental, scriptable, object oriented, alternative, etc, web browser. ViolaWWW is an extensible World Wide Web hypermedia browser. Based on and drawing from the Viola scripting language and toolkit, ViolaWWW provides a way to build relatively complex hypermedia applications that are beyond the provisions of the current HTML 3.0 standard. The Viola browser was the very first web browser to support interactive embedded objects, and other features such as tables, input forms, stylesheet. Source: viola homepage: http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/violaHome.h tml
fuvoo: watch something
They are abusing the system
...oh pardon me, I mean Micro$oft, a.k.a The Devil
How is this abusing the system???
There is a retrial because apparently prior art was concealed in a patent case. Seems legit to me. Or is it only bad because it's Microsoft?
And for the record, I'm a 100% Linux user who is not a Microsoft fan, but this retrial is totally justified IMHO.
Slackware
im not sure if this has been suggested before, but who thinks patents should be (like trademarks) valid on a 'use it or lose it' basis, to prevent submarine patents, like this one?
Yeah, yeah
But when the firefox against slashdot case will have an agreement?
It is quite irritating the way it renders right now...
Sign me on that petition. I read Slashdot and I hear about a "new" (old) patent like this almost every month. It makes me frightened just to write my own code...but then that's probably what Eolas wants. I hope not.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
no no no, we want microsoft to WIN this time. why this time? good question. *blank stare*
The author Pei Wei tells his story of the Eolas patent here and how prior art was suppressed.
Maybe if knowingly withholding prior art was a federal crime this would not have happenned.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
http://www.xcf.berkeley.edu/~wei/viola/aboutEolasM icrosoft.html
I believe this is the plug-in case and for once I wholeheartedly agree with MS. If they lost this one Firefox and Opera would likely have been vulnerable as well so keep in the mind the enemy of enemies thing.
Of course I do you pompous jerk! Well, on second thought, no not really. Sorry for making an ass out of myself.
Guess it just goes to show that anything's possible
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And it would be helpful to have a precedence case.
Wow. Can I be really cool like you? Can I spell "Microsoft" with a dollarsign to show that I'm hip and with it and not a Microsoft drone? Can I be so smart that I don't need to read the story to find out if I'm right or just blowing smoke out of my ass?
I'm about as far from a Microsoft fan as you can get, but acting like an idiot child does your side no good at all.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Slashdot is depressing. Look at the front page:
That's a lot of ligitation nonsense for one day. I'm not blaming the editors since this stuff is the news. But it's disheartening nonetheless. You'd almost forget that this stuff can be fun some of the time.
Don't you mean Eolas v. Microsoft?
Once again, don't hate the [ActiveX] standard. Didn't I just do this yesterday with Flash?
I don't hate the standard; I just hate its use across the Internet because ActiveX objects run with full privileges of the local user. If the standard were to specify that ActiveX objects run in the sandbox of the guest user account, I would not hate the standard even for use across the Internet. SWF is fundamentally different because as far as I know, it doesn't automatically grant the right to read and write local files.
Hopefully the retrial will show what a scumbag Eolas is, and fine the living tar out of them for filing applications when he knew of prior art and didn't submit it.
Then, hopefully, they'll investigate every other patent Eolas holds, charge the owner the research costs, and toss a few more out.
Idiots.
Why do people fall for this? I suspect the poster was deliberately trying to provoke people by switching the report around. Straight from troll guide 101.
Geez. Not only are most Slashdotters ignorant, but so are journalists (yeah yeah, big news?). Although doing the exact thing(s) patent covers is (part of) prior art, the reverse is not necessarily true: prior art is a loose term referring to things done in same domain, related things; past inventions, well-known techniques and so on. Prior art means anything relevant to the patent that has already been done; not just things patent itself if covers.
Patent applications usually list tons of prior art, and for a good reason: it gives the impression that the applicant (applicant's lawyers) have done some research regarding novelty of the patented invention, and where it stands with respect to the current state of the art in the field (ok ok; or that's the idea, probably not the reality though).
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
MS is the defendant. But you're otherwise right.
about the claimed violation of U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906 may be read from the PDF at this address. I'm kind of curious why, since Microsoft, in Washington State, and the University of California, whose location is left as an exercise to the reader, are both located in the 9th Circuit, that the case was originally tried in Illinois, the 7th Circuit. Probably that's where Eolas is located.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Fun ! Now MS tries to force Eola to supply prove against themselves. I allway's thought that it was the *right* of someone *not* to indict him/herself.
...
:-)
And it's not that the *world available* evidence could not have been found by a company that has *that* much money to spend in search of something that would support their side of the story
I mean : the Viola-browser was (probably) available to anyone who cared to pay it's price, so it was/is quite visible. What ammount of concealment could than make it invisible to the world ? None I would say.
But than again, IANAL, and not MS either
If Perry Pei-Yuan Wei is fully correct, we are simply talking about old fashioned patent fraud.
Microsoft v. Ebola.
And I thought to myself "whoever wins, we lose".
wbs.
Huh?
Is it the patent submitter's obligation to research prior art ? If this goes through the way it's writte n above (no I didn't RTFA), then it could mean all patent submitters are liable if prior art is found.
Not that it's a bad idea, might slow down the craze a bit.
This already exists in one form: Patents (actually patent law) already have the severe problem of forcing the patent holder to fight anything that might be related to his patent because not doing so can be proof of abandoning it. This can lead to losing your patent when challenged. Granted, this is not the same thing, but it works with the same kind of reasoning "if someone is going to patent something then they'll probably take it seriously because of the penalties they are putting themselves at risk to"
Now you want patent holders to "use it" which usually means they need some kind of market presence? Err, what if they cant find investors in time? What if the idea is 15 years ahead of its time? How long till this silly proposed idea leads to a losing one's patent and a deep-pocketed company just lifting the idea and selling just enough units to keep the patent from going bad? Lets not give corporate america more power with patents.
The problem with patents is that there's way too much rubber stamping going on, especially for software patents. If there is a solution here, it probably lies with dismissing all software patents and getting rid of the "defend it or lose it" laws which only hurts patent holders and do a good job of keeping legal departments busy. If not that, then a much stricter definition on what can be patented. Some high-profile perjury convictions for ignoring prior art would be nice too.
Microsoft getting away with a fine because of prior art?!?!?!! Does that mean we'll get away with our patent infringments on things like Virtual Desktops???.