Online Rich Media Patented

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Thursday February 23, 2006 @12:56AM from the it's-mine-now dept.

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."

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Re:Important Clarification + Rant by suv4x4 · 2006-02-23 01:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

The patent covers content created online, i.e. if FrontPage was running from Internet Explorer as a Flash or Avalon+XML or HTML/JS, then it'd probably have pieces affected by the patent.

This is one more case of "same stuff but in a new medium" patents, just like Apple patenting their "unique" menu system (used on iPod) for use on mobile devices, as if we never used tree menus before.