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Eolas To Sue Apple, Google, and 21 Others
vinodis and several other readers sent along the news that Eolas is suing 23 companies including Apple and Google for patent infringement. The company won $585M from Microsoft in a drawn-out, 9-year battle that the companies settled in 2007; in the course of it the USPTO upheld the "906" patent several times. Now, Eolas is also in possession of a newly-issued patent that they claim covers the use of any browser plugin with AJAX. Let's see how far this lawsuit gets before the Supreme Court plays its wildcard in the Bilski case, which we have been discussing for a while now.
It seems some judges forget to obey the internet rules...
Indemnity, please.
What the hell does this mean?
a newly issued patent that they claim covers the use of any browser plugin with AJAX
What do plugins and AJAX have to do with each other? Are they saying you can't build a browser that supports AJAX? I don't understand what the patent is for.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
1- Other will be sued if they succeed.
2- MS, Abble and others will get more and more defensive patents..
So here we go...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
There needs to be special judges just for technology cases. The existing judges are completely out of their realm when it comes to technology patent judgements. I hate that some 80 year old judge who has never used a computer in his/her life has any kind of say-so technology patents. These judges can probably barely grasp how to turn a computer on let alone make a ruling on anything that has to do with them.
For a second I read that as "EULAs To Sue Apple, Google, and 21 Others"...oh, the irony.
I think we've hit the breaking point for software patents. The i4i suit was the first real big patent case I can remember (disclaimer, I have a short memory), especially due to the number of people affected - not just users, but retailers like Dell (according to them). This one ought to make everyone say "enough is enough".
[/fingers_crossed]
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
This is the type of scum of the earth shit that ruins productivity, innovation, and increases costs for every other consumer. Everyone wants to throw CEO's in jail yet these douche bags don't do ANYTHING productive for society. At least CEO's try and make their companies profitable(by providing services to consumers), even if it is just to cash in stock options.
Talk about the ultimate drain on society being upheld by the government... we need to vote against the judges and politicians that allow this to happen under their watch. GET OUT AND VOTE AGAINST THIS!! It will lower the cost of doing business and consequently the cost of goods and services. It will make these lawyers get out of the legal system for frivolous shit and back to doing something productive for society.
Can someone link this this "985 patent"? I can't find it linked in any article on this subject. Why do major media never link to anything?
These are the spawn of Satan that forced the whole web to change the way they embed Flash movies, among other things.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
MS is not on the list... so one assumes that they are some type of agreement in place.
I'm just assuming that the developers who use MS products, would get some type of protection... Isn't that what MS has always said.
For much less than 500 million, you can probably get a very discreet and effective hit squad to take out the entire management of Eolas and the attorneys too.
They would probably do the attorneys for free.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you are able to sue 23 corporations that are also competitors for infringing on your patent, doesn't that pretty much mean it's an obvious, non-unique patent & should be thrown out?
There is a war going on for your mind.
It's not illegal for Eolas to hire someone to walk up to people on the street and telling them they're idiots. "Not illegal" does not mean "appropriate". Try again.
As for "condemn[ing] a company for following the law", no one said that it's wrong that they follow the law, but it does not therefore follow that everything not specifically forbidden by law is ethical or appropriate.
Yup, it's true. I did IT work for a group of them back when I was in college. I was "team one", and they had some other guys who were "team two". We helped them in shifts.
One day I got a phone call.
It was one of the lawyers. He couldn't log on. "The box under my computer is missing."
Ah, I think. Those wily rascals in Team 2 snagged his UPS or his power strip and didn't replace it. No biggie. I'll buy a power strip and scoot on over.
I look under his desk.
His PC is missing.
The cords to his monitor, mouse, and keyboard were dangling in space and he sat there typing away wondering why he couldn't "log on".
I apologize for the nightmares, heebie-jeebies, and general loss of sleep you'll have from my story. Yes folks, these are the people in charge of our livelihood.
We're screwed.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
No, Eolas is a shit head. He just happens to live in a society where shit heads who are wealthy through immoral work are tolerated. I can and do absolutely condemn companies who violate the spirit but not the letter of laws for material gain. Patent laws do need to be changed, but so does our attitude towards companies that operate entirely in the grey area of legal loopholes.
Your moral reasoning in this situation is no different from the assholes who market overpriced pens to senior citizens, or con poor people out of their land with loans they don't understand. Just because something is technically legal doesn't make it right. And defending asswipes like Eolas and Skilling makes you part of the problem, not of the solution.
And you'll quickly see a problem developing for patent law. There need to be new laws established, because the speed at which technology has developed has made nearly all legal thought on the subject obsolete.
Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." --Thomas Jefferson
If people stopped moaning instead of suing each other, we might make some progress. Really they are behaving like little children who have had some candy taken off them. I say develop, be inspired and when the "Big Guns" have stopped fighting, they will realise they have missed the boat after all their petty wranglings. This quote from Spike Millgan is quite appropriate here - "MONEY CANNOT BUY YOU FRIENDS, HOWEVER, IT DOES GET YOU A BETTER CLASS OF ENEMY".
All cows eat grass!
I wonder how much it would cost to simply buy 51% of Eolas? If the shares are publicly traded, with 23 companies being sued it might even be possible for them to buy a small share parcel each without too much notice.
Buy the company and do what? Sorry but due to various responsibilities, Google, Apple, etc. would more than likely be legally forced to keep the patents and keep trying to sue (Eolas being a patent troll has no real assets other than BS patents) to make the investment worthwhile for its shareholders.
If none of them own a controlling share the only reasonable expectations from investors would be the nullification of the mutual threat to their companies.
Without a controlling share, no individual among the group would be able to wield it unilaterally, and anti-trust law would prevent collusion.
I think buying them out and replacing the management or liquidating the company would be an excellent idea.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Search for "eastern district" on page:
# Search PACER for case number 6:09-cv-00446 in the eastern district of Texas
If anyone invented a faster way to recognize patent trolls the world would beat a path to their door (and then sue for patent infringement).
I can't recall the specifics now, but when Eolas sued MS over their other patent in the past, didn't they try to come out as the "good guys" by claiming that they will only pursue patent claims against Big Bad MS, and won't go after alternative browsers?
Who else remembers hotjava, available on the internet from Dec 1994? Now, although that's just after the filing of the original patent, the development took place before the filing date. Sun would seem to be a good place to start looking for prior art, especially if anything pertaining to the technical details were publically announced or made available before then.
If the patent is blatantly illegitimate and is easy to prove it should be invalid then the lawyers are actually breaking the law.
Yeah, but any lawyer that is worth their salt would be able to argue that it is their honest opinion that there is factual basis for the claim. After all, if there wasn't dissent about the validity of the claim, it would be settled out of court.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
They would probably do the attorneys for free.
This is a common misconception. Actually they charge extra, because of all the hawthorn bullets and garlic they have to use.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=fb6475b9d6e027cf1bee9a6e9edd9c76e04e75f6e8ebb871
is a potentially disruptive set of IP being trolled, although not nearly so effectively as that of Eolas. Covers at least as many web infrastructure operations as the Eolas IP. Think Bilski won't touch this, as Bilski's attack point was the "abstract idea" problem, whereas this discusses algorithms running on hardware, which would lead to the change in state of a real machine that the Bilski judicial review seems to want.
And the people that fell for it are idiots, or at least very naive. People who operate like this are NOT good people. They are not interested in the public good. They are interested in lining their pockets. There's no other reason to try and troll with patents.
It is one thing if you have a company that really makes products. They may have legit reasons for going forward with a patent case, even if the patent in question is kinda silly (they also may not). After all, they have a real market they are trying to protect. However the "IP firms"? They are 100% worthless. Their only reason to exist is to milk money from companies, they produce -nothing-.
As such if you get any "good guy" claims from them, well they are bullshit.
They say HTML in the patent.... who know what a well thinking judge will think of a SGML derivative like HTML
As other prior art examples consider Apple's own Hypertext ... or Xerox Viewpoint software, which was a document frame embedding executable objects like graphics, tables, spreadsheets, etc ... at the very least it would appear Hypertext was a precursor of the browser and of the mechanisms being claimed by these patents ... both of these date from the mid 1980's (perhaps even earlier for Viewpoint).
I'm not kidding, shoot them an e-mail letting them know you worked on this, with some links to relevant details. They may blow you off, but if the mail gets to the right person, they'll be very interested.
Let me know if you figure out a way patent the EULA and sue everyone who uses one. I'm sure the lawyers would love the recursion. It'd be like a perpetual money machine.
I approve of Eolas in the same way I approve of nuclear weapons; horrible destructive ability that should only be unleashed on the worst possible garbage in the world.
Eolas promised not to sue non-profit companies such as Firefox on the basis of this patent. My question is, if they are capable of suing Apple and Google, both of whom have spent considerable amounts of money developing Webkit and providing the source code of their work available for all for free, then what stops Eolas from suing Firefox? Will we let patent litigation take us into the dark ages of the Internet?
I'm being lazy here, but according to Wikipedia:
Techniques for the asynchronous loading of content date back to the mid 1990s. Java applets were introduced in the first version of the Java language in 1995. These allow compiled client-side code to load data asynchronously from the web server after a web page is loaded.[5] In 1996, Internet Explorer introduced the IFrame element to HTML, which also enables this to be achieved.[6] In 1999, Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX control in Internet Explorer 5, which is now supported by Mozilla, Safari and other browsers as the native XMLHttpRequest object.[6][7] However, this feature only became widely known after being used by Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).[8]
IANAL, IAN even a legal hobbyist, but wouldn't this prior art insubstantiate the patent?
You won't truly understand what's going on until you examine the system. You cannot explain why big business loves software patents even if they lose a patent lawsuit here and there.
Microsoft and many other large corporations (particularly IBM which holds the most patents) will never "admit that software patents are just plain bad" because software patents are not bad for them. Software patents pay off very well for them in the long run. Software patents don't benefit society for a variety of reasons which Richard Stallman has expertly gone into in his patent talks. Software patents don't benefit you or me specifically: we are liable to lose a patent infringement lawsuit; ask patent holder Paul Heckel how he was able to get money from Apple in 1990 by threatening to sue Apple's users for infringing a couple of his patents which, according to Heckel's lawyer, read on something Apple was doing in Hypercard. But big businesses benefit and one big business can come close to quantifying that benefit.
As bad as you find patent payoffs to be, that's not the half of it. Cross-licensing patents is worth more and is far more revealing about how patents don't (in the propagandist language lawyers use) "protect" anyone. In IBM's magazine "Think", #5 from 1990, IBM told us how much more patent cross-licensing is worth to them: 10X more. Quoting from a talk Richard Stallman gave about the problem with software patents:
This is why IBM recently filed a friend of the court brief which makes no serious dent in the ability to obtain and use software patents. This is why they don't want the patent system to flatly reject ideas expressed as algorithms in computer software as some other areas of endeavor are simply unpatentable. IBM is the king of the hill. And as the US foists its patent regime on other countries through trade agreements (under duress, no doubt), IBM will be there cheering them on.
So if you don't see that it is the system that needs to be corrected, if you want to go on with "Fuck Eolas"; if you believe that the players in that system are somehow going to turn around and see things your way without any compelling reason to do so, you will find it difficult to understand how to properly reign in the power big business and make big businesses the subordinate of citizens as they ought to be. And to think, this is the easy issue to get right: software patents aren't even a life and death issue like other patents are (we have yet to see the full flower of the ramifications of the Chakrabarty decision which made it possible to patent a living organism, for example), like other corporate-driven/anti-citizen policies are.
Digital Citizen
In case anyone was curious like myself and needed a history lesson on this AJAX bit, this page seems relevant and fairly informative:
http://ajaxpatterns.org/Whats_Ajax
Why isn't Google or Microsoft don't just buy Eolas? then they would have the patent for themself and could sue more and get more money =)
They patented Pei Wei's idea because he neglected to patent it .. and now they are making loads of cash. What's Pei Wei get? Nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW#Microsoft_v._Eolas_and_ViolaWWW_prior_art
C'mon guys that was too easy.
Citrix for presentation server & published apps? VMware for their PCOIP? Wyse? X.org?
It seems like in 7,599,985, they've successfully patented thin-client, VDI, and any remote application control/access/interactive media viewing from an embedded web app....
The invention allows a program to execute on a remote server or other computers to calculate the viewing transformations and send frame data to the client computer thus providing the user of the client computer with interactive features and allowing the user to have access to greater computing power than may be available at the user's client computer.
The patent "agreement" or social contract if you will is twofold. You get exclusivity, but you ALSO must SHARE your idea in a standard form and language of technical detail. Now anybody can see what you did and how. Patents are as much a learning tool as they are an economic engine.
Patents are a GOOD thing. Bad patents are a bad thing. Software patents are a good thing. Bad software patents are a bad thing.
What a loathsome greedy company - it makes my skin crawl to read about this.
How destructive this is to society and innvovation. A normal human being would think half a billion dollars is enough to satisfy the money lust. AND what mindless buffoon determined that the patent is worth half a billion? Shouldn't the fee be commensurate with what it would have been licensed for at the outset?
God help this country.
The problem is with the institution that applied for such a bad patent in the first place: the University of California.
As a public, educational institution, their patent attorneys should have been responsible enough not to patent a feature that clearly has prior art and is already widely used on the web.
That's all that comes to my mind when I hear the words patent and U.S. in the same sentence. And that doesn't only apply to the IT.
The whole patent system should be put where it belongs: into the dustbin
What are the big companies (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Adobe, you know, all those that develop proprietary software) waiting to buy, I mean, lobby the required politicians in the US in order to abolish software patents?
Hoisted by their own petard, and they will continue to be so until they realize that the system as it is has to be abolished.
Honestly, they could solve this problem in a matter of weeks, but they don't because they like it like it is.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
At some point one has to decide when a law is simply immoral and stop benefiting from it.
Many people knew slavery was immoral, heck, many slave owners raped female slaves in the full knowledge that they were as human as themselves, but at the same time would stand for the shameful idea that slaves where subhuman and thus subject to be treated as such, as long as their sexual urges could continue to be satisfied and the slaves continued generating money for them.
During apartheid in South Africa, most White folk decided the status quo was OK, but there were many notable people that understood how disgusting the system was and fought against it, in many occasions to great detriment of their personal wealth and safety.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's nearly impossible to have a single mind that can understand both the solid logic of computers and the twisted convolutions of the court system.
It's like trying to drink soup with a fork.
With such a massive lawsuit, they are risking the web, how web works, how people gather information, how decisions are made.
How does USA judicial system allow such a risk?
IMHO they shouldn't surrender. They should counter sue them to the point of those lawyers and company execs lose down to their underpants. That will really teach any "obvious patent troll" a lesson out there.
I don't see such stupid lawsuits to the extent of breaking how internet works in any other countries. I think some people out there really needs a lesson. Winning the court is easy in fact, just uninstall all plugins from Judge's laptop and tell him to browse that way as he would ordinarily do.
ClickToFlash was an instant hit on Mac download sites when it shipped for Safari which has some user profile who doesn't care for such geek extension stuff.
I think browser vendors should use this as opportunity to make "click to run plugin" a standard. I wonder around with JVM applet disabled OS X Tiger because Apple refused to fix the latest security issue. If I had "click to run applet" built into Safari, it would be way more secure thing.
ps: I know near all other browsers have such capability but default OS browser really matters.
I built mapping mainstreet.org in 1999 but we had to wait 10 years to launch it because of legal disputes over security issues with filming video along with city maps on a public website without a login.
It wasn't called AJAX until 2000. (DHTML)
I have to assume that the Phoenix Brands licensed Ajax to Eolas.
I know Ajax was a decent bactericide; does it also handle viruses? Do I scrub my main board, hard drive, memory???? Regarding the law suit, with this novel of application of a kitchen cleanser, I would fully support them.
It would cost a lot less than 585 million to have some large persistent gentlemen visit Eolas Prez, V.P., board members and major investors to convince them to drop their suit. Baseball bats @ 3:00 a.m. and family security and well being are powerful motivators. Eolas should find other more honest avenues of revenue or at least not complain about the possible risks of pissing off those who can afford protection before payoff.
(These same gentlemen are available for collections work, insurance and paparazzi control)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Aren't these two technologies pretty ubiquitous now? Can ANYONE create a good, interactive site without violating one of the two patents in question (or the third one they're waiting to unleash on us)?
Patents like this are absolutely INSANE, and are a bane to the necessary creativity and flow of ideas needed for growth and prosperity.
Would anyone seriously consider allowing a vague patent on a method of "linking two disparate networks via a common device to intelligently allow information to pass from one network to another" (a ROUTER)? Or, how about "a method of directly introducing medicine and other substances directly into the corpus of a human or other animal" (a HYPODERMIC SYRINGE)?
NEWS FLASH: Ford chooses to enforce little known patent on "a method of using a motorized conveyance for the transportation of people and goods" (a CAR), and is now suing every other auto manufacturer in the world for patent infringement.
Stupid, but it makes the point, no?
Some things just shouldn't be patentable.
...are a steely eyed missile man.
Brilliant. That is exactly the right way to handle that. *applause*
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Please email licensing@eolas.com to inquire about potential licensing arrangements for your organization. They'll appreciate all the new business inquiries.
closed minded is as closed minded does
how u make that inverted p?
wait
nevermind
coding is life
"Let's see how far this lawsuit gets before the Supreme Court plays its wildcard in the Bilski case, which we have been discussing for a while now"
Um, if they make it all the way to the Supreme Court, then doesn't that, by definition, mean that they've made it pretty far? I mean, in legal matters, the SC is pretty much almost as far as one can possibly make it.
do you think he'd complain that the car wouldn't start? No, he'd file a police report that someone stole his engine.
That would require actually opening the hood and looking to see the engine missing, how many people do that? How many don't call AAA or a tow truck before opening the hood?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
patents.
We can dream. But no, I don't think this will do it. We've had others that were supposed to be the end of software patents, such as Eolas vs Microsoft, but weren't. Perhaps if enough of us write to our senators and reps they will get off their collective asses and do something.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
they're just doing what is legally possible.
They are the bad people here. Would you apply that to someone who goes around killing people if the laws allowed it? The law allows it so he's not bad. I bet a bunch of survivors of the NAZIs, Pot Pol, Sadam, and Rwanda would disagree.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The reason is that they will get the patent laws looked at for what they are: INSANE
What makes you think patent laws will be looked at now when they weren't looked at after RIM was sued by NTP over the Blackberry? Even politicians and the wealthy used Blackberries but did they force a review of patent laws? Nope! The US Justice Department even filed a brief in support of RIM, knowing full well that government workers used Blackberries for work. The US Department of Defense (DOD) even stated they were crucial for national security. RIM eventually had to pay NTP $612.5 million (USD).
No matter how many slashdotters have wishful dreams I doubt this case will precipitate a reexamination of patent laws.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
But corporations are. The whole point of corporations is that both shareholders and executive are insulated from certain liabilities that enable them to do things a private person legally could not.
No, corporations were given corporate charters, which grants that limited liability, only if they served the common or public good. Businesses were given limited liability if it was thought the business would help people. The first two corporations given charters, specifically for this reason, was the British East India Company the Dutch East India Company. Corporations have had their corporate charters revoked because they no longer served the public good. Petitioners requested Unocal have it's charter revoked after it supported the military in Burma in forcing Karen tribesmen to vacate land they owned and to work as porters and in other low wage positions for Unocal.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Absolutely. Not only that but most of them were doing what was economically imperative to compete in the current market of the day.
Actually you're wrong here. Owning slaves cost more than paying freemen a living wage. Economists studying economics and slavery in the US concluded southern slave owners could not compeat on price with northerners who paid living wages. Owning slaves have additional costs. For instance those watching or guarding slaves have to be paid and there's the cost of chains and shackles. If not for the Civil War slavery would have ended within another generation or two. If not for the "Fugitive Slave Act (which Abraham Lincoln strongly supported)" slavery who have ended sooner.
When everyone else is using slave labor (cheap immigrants, outsourced call centers, H1B Visaed IT)
That is not slavery. In every one of those cases the workers have a choice, and most get paid more than others in the same area, in the case of outsourcing, or more than those at home in the case of immigrants. These people are very much willing to work for what they get paid. Just because they are willing to work for less than you are does not make them slaves. But they do drive your cost of living down.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
And remember, corporations are fairly recent stuff. It has not existed until recently.
First, define "recently", ie what do you mean by saying "corporations are fairly recent stuff"?
Next, corporations' existence depends on ethics and morality. The first 2 corporations were granted corporate charters, which granted them their limited liability, in 1602 and 1604. This limited liability was only granted because it was for the better. The common or public good was improved it was thought by granting limited liability.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
annoying hog of resources, and no reputable websites even use it anymore.
How do you define "reputable websites"? By whether they use java?
How about A List Apart, are they bad because they include java programs?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I think you've hinted the answer to the first question fairly well yourself. Compare the emergence of corporation regulation in the 17th cen. with Corpus Juris Civilis of the Eastern Roman Empire, 6th century.
Next, well yes, corporations are operated by humans, and humans are subjected to ethics and morality, as is a human society in which corporations exist. However this does not necessarily imply that corporations are capable of exercising moral judgments or acting morally (I mean, in some way that's compatible with moral standards of humans). Corporation is a human creation and no human creation inherits all aspects of humanity.
Moreover, in my opinion the competition among corporations naturally repels those who failed to maximize its profit. Should the moral standards come into conflicts with profit, what choice do you expect from corporations?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The patent filed in 2002 was for an extension of a patent granted in 1998.
IANAL, IAN even a legal hobbyist, but wouldn't this prior art insubstantiate the patent?
Java isn't prior art. Work started on Java in 1991, by James Gosling, but it wasn't released until 1995. "Eolas said it first demonstrated in 1993 -- and for which it received a U.S. patent in 1998". Java was developed concurrently.
I'm not supporting Eolas, I don't know what the patent covers or if it's a valid patent, here but I wanted to correct your information.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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