Supreme Court Rejects Microsoft Eolas Appeal

mixmasterjake writes "The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear a Microsoft appeal in the software company's ongoing Web browsing patent dispute with the University of California and Eolas Technologies. The dispute arises over the Eolas patent for 'a system allowing a user of a browser program ... to access and execute an embedded program object.' From the article: "With today's decision, the Supreme Court decided not to hear Microsoft's argument relating to how damages in the case should be calculated. Microsoft had been asking the court to reject a previous ruling that damages should be awarded based on Microsoft's U.S. and foreign sales, saying that the Eolas patent should only apply to U.S. products. The Supreme Court did not give a reason for its rejection of Microsoft's appeal."

Comments

didn't hear cause legal question long settled

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok,
in the eyes of the Courts, this question has long been settled. If I am remembering my Patent law correctly ( you patent lawyers out there please correct if wrong) trying to split the "outside world" from the U.S. is not considered, especially if those involved in the case are of U.S. "citizenship."
This is to prevent someone from using someone else's patent for profit overseas.
Looks like Microsoft needs some more/better patent attorneys...

What you get

[gnarlin]

They have made their bed, and now they must lie in it. If they support software idea patents
then they must also be willing to pay dearly to those who will do nothing but litigate
using them.

Sooner or later even these big companies must realise that it is more expensive in the long
haul to support software patents when there are constantly more and more companies that
don't make anything and are only out to litigate; and since crosslicensing with them is
useless, since they don't make anything, all they can do is constantly pay up.

Re:Oh the Irony...

[mickwd]

"Scary as it is, Microsoft and other large software companies have patented software ideas and algorithms in order to make sure that no other company would go and patent the same idea and use it against them."

Then why have they pushed so hard to have software patenting made legal in the EU ?

Microsoft wants to lose this

[cpu_fusion]

This case is, in my opinion, a huge bit of theatrics. Microsoft wants to lose this case, and here is why:

This patent, if enforced, would provide Microsoft a $500 million penalty for the ENFORCEMENT of plugins not being a possibility for browsers unless licensing is paid.

What would this mean? Well, you could kiss your Flash, Java VM, etc. goodbye! Not only that, but Firefox would have to block plugins like that as well!

Yes, as you can see, that would be a wet dream for Microsoft. The ability to dictate exactly what functionality is in IE, with the excuse of patents as an excuse.

So if Microsoft totally botches this case and sets up legal precident for Eolas to have this patent, you'll know why. They WANT It there. It's all part of their IP war against Linux, Firefox, and all things good and holy. (tm).

Microsoft: always playing the system. Never innovating. Might makes right!

Re:Microsoft's loss is Mozilla's loss

[dkf]

You are aware that that's exactly what Eolas are doing? (I've met the people from Eolas, and they're smart regular technical people and not patent leeches, err, lawyers.)

Re:Microsoft's loss is Mozilla's loss

[belmolis]

Eolas has sponsored a number of OSS projects using Tcl according to this article on the Tcl/Tk wiki.

Re:Eolas, dlopen(), and Sun Microsystems.

[drew]

Prior Art has to have occurred before the patent was filed(*) not before it was issued. It could have easily taken two years or more between the date of filing and the date of issue. Of course, I still think the patent is bogus, as the basic idea has been around for along time. I think it is ridiculous that people can take an existing idea and apply it to a new media and suddenly get a patent for it.

On the other hand, I'm a little torn on this particular patent. The patent basically covers java and flash applets that run automatically when a web page is loaded. Microsoft's proposed workaround for the patent worked almost exactly the same as the Firefox click-to-play flash plugin. If this were to be the required behavior for all web browsers that don't want to pay to license the Eolas patent, I think it could be the greatest thing to happen to the web in years...

(*) I believe that technically (in the U.S.) prior art actually has to precede when the invention was invented not when the patent was filed. The company could have 'invented' the idea a year before they filed, and so long as they had some sort of proof about when the invention took place, prior art would have to precede the invention date ratherthan the filing date.