Eolas COO Says IE Changes A Shame

capt turnpike writes "Hot on the heels of Microsoft's announcement of a 60-day period in which Web developers will have to change their pages' architecture, the COO of Eolas, the company whose suit forced these changes, gives an interview to eWEEK.com in which he says these changes are a disappointment. Confused? From the article: 'There is no court order forcing Microsoft to do anything. Anything that is being done is of Microsoft's own choosing,' His position is that publicizing these forced changes strengthens MS's case."

Comments

Very disappointing

[blane.bramble]

From the point of view of his cash flow...

No, What's A Shame Is

[Naked Chef]

the completely broken patent and copyright system in the U.S. that allows such ridiculous lawsuits to happen in the first place, which encourages companies like Microsoft to file thousands of "defensive" patents per year, exacerbating the problem. But nobody can figure out what stifles innovation....hmm.

Re:No, What's A Shame Is

[0xdeadbeef]

Damn you, you overflowed my ignore list. Now I must find the least vacuous contrarian to remove.

Re:No, What's A Shame Is

[Jtheletter]

I've gotta say, I don't really see the innovation yet being stifled. [...] Maybe the fact that people can't 'innovate' tiny little changes to other people's ideas is forcing creativity to higher levels.

This has nothing to do with a lack of creativity or inventiveness on the inventor's part, this has to do with broad and vague patents that cover too much, or too obvious things. In addition the entire patent space is comepltely cluttered with these sorts of things making sorting out relevance from the noise frustrating, time consuming and expensive.

Being an engineer I've had quite a few ideas for new things, one of the biggest problems I have faced is trying to determine if it's even worth applying for a patent or spending time developing it. Unlike a huge corporation my funds are very limited, so I don't have an extra $1,000++ to just take a shot at patenting something that may not even be accepted, or even worse - is accepted but is later found to infringe on someone else's overly broad patent. Have you ever tried to research existing patents to determine if something you've come up with is new? Not only is it time consuming and difficult, the language of the patents makes it nearly impossible to figure out if something applies even when you think you may have found a hit. The solution is to hire a patent company/attorney to do the search for you, but now we're talking easily $150/hr in fees for the service, and on top of that your patent needs to be worded in the same obfuscated legalease to have a chance at actually providing your idea with protection.

Innovation is being stifled by the sharp increase in barriers to entry. I've looked into it and just applying for a patent and including search and support costs it easily costs $2500 on the cheap end. Sure you could just pay the patent office fees and give them what you've come up with on your own but you'd basically be throwing your money away since in all likelyhood you will need some sort of councel to get it through the system.

All of these huge corporations filing "defensive" patents is making it so difficult/expensive that the individual inventor who doesn't already have business funding capital is pretty much out of luck. :(

I hope this one is over with soon...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

This whole case makes me feel violated. Not only is it a patent-troll case, but it's one that makes me side with Microsoft on something. I feel so unclean...

the end of activex?

[radical_dementia]

I think perhaps one reason they are avoiding buying a patent license is because they are planning on doing away with activex. I've already heard the xmlhttprequest used for Ajax will be built in to IE7 and not as an activex control. Its possible other things like Flash and Acrobat will do the same.