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Online Rich Media Patented
An anonymous reader writes "Balthasar has been awarded a patent on "Methods, systems, and processes for the design and creation of rich-media applications via the internet" ( USPO 7,000,180). In an article at news.com the company claims that "The patent covers all rich-media technology implementations including Flash, Flex, Java, AJAX and XAML and all device footprints which access rich-media Internet applications including desktops, mobile devices, set-top boxes and video game consoles". The patent was filed on 9 February 2001, five years after the original Flash application, FutureWave Splash, was introduced in May 1996."
An article in Information Week mentions that Balthaser was formerly a VP of strategy at Macromedia, so I'm sure they'll be interested in how his employment contract with them affects this patent's ownership and validity. It also mentions that he used Macromedia Flash 3 in the late 1990s, at least two years prior to receiving the patent. If anyone buys this patent from him they'll be up against big players, and it'll be war. And the patent will almost certainly be invalidated. Then again, if anyone is dumb enough to buy it, maybe I should approach them about buying my patent number 4,815,162,342 entitled "A Method for Utilizing and Commercializing a Simultaneously Suspended and Supported Access Route from Manhattan to Brooklyn."
The prosecution outline was utterly normal: Restriction, election by applicant, first action rejection, response with amendment, final rejection, response with amendment after final rejection, allowance. The first rejection had a "double patenting rejection", which was a technicality, since the parent application was still pending; it was allowed to abandon, mooting this ground of rejection. In addition, some, but not all, of the claims were rejected as anticipated (35 USC 102(e)) over a patent with an earlier filing date. There were no other rejections, in particular, no obviousness (35 USC 103) rejections.
A consequence of item 2 above is that the applicant is entitled to file up to four divisional applications, each one, if its claims are limited to the invention outlined in the restriction requirement, are immune to double patenting rejections based on the current application claims (they will still be rejectable, however, based on prior art).
Now, I have no idea what circumstances surrounded the handling of this application, but I can speculate that there was a fight by the examiners not to get stuck with this application ("It's a dog!") and, when the examiner of record got stuck with it he was, additionally pressured to get an action out ASAP, reflecting PTO management's long held policy of keeping production high and time to action short. This is one motivation for making the first action a restriction requirement; it gets the case off the books for a month or two, but of course when the election comes back it's back in play and has to be handled.
"Delivering whatsoever over the internet" is called FTP.
However, that's not really what's being dealt with here. HTML was designed with rich content in mind. It can transfer any kind of file specifiable by mimetype, *including* Flash etc., and was intended to do that interactively, thereby making it a superset of Flash in concept. Java Applets were available in HTML 3.0, which was a LONG time ago now (1995/6, I think?).
Moreover, HTML is superior in design, despite some misuse. It's independent of resolution, browser, etc., and was designed to be future-proof, based on previous future proof document formats. This essentially makes it less implementation-bound and more forward-thinking than the proprietary Flash format.
Also, the very first interactive web apps were done with CGI, developed back in 1993. This uses the very successful and now re-popularised "REST" model, which isn't going anywhere as a modern solution to interactivity.