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Retrial Slated for Microsoft v. Eolas

Posted by Zonk on from the back-on-the-wheel dept.

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.

3 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. No, only trademarks by JoeBuck · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. From viola by Virtual+Karma · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  3. hmm by mattyrobinson69 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?