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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.
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.
Uh, looks like they did link it at the end, you just have to RTFA:
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
Rule 34 on the judges? No thanks.
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.
I just read that and it sounds like a patent for Javascript..
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
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.
Is that all? Excellent! In that case I think that I can cite an example of prior art.
I worked on a system called "MUCH", short for "Many Users Creating Hypermedia", at the University of Liverpool in England back in 1989-1992. Running on UNIX and built in-house by postgraduate students under the guidance of Professor Roy Rada using C and the Andrew Toolkit", the project itself was inspired by Ted Nelson's "Project Xanadu". Mention of the project is also made in Prof. Rada's C.V. at his current employer, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Fairly obviously, given the name, MUCH allowed multiple users to collaboratively create SGML based hypermedia documents via an integrated version control mechanism similar to that employed by Wikipedia. These documents, while mostly textual (it was the early 1990's!) besides having the ability to contain both graphical and audio content, could also contain any number of embedded external applets written using the Andrew Toolkit. Some of the proof of concept applications developed while I was there (work continued after I left) included animated clocks, calendars, calculators and other widgets, many of which were interactive.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I just read that and it sounds like a patent for Javascript..
or HTML
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
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.
Like keyboard and mouse condoms? Or does a full body condom arrive in the mail with every visual studio purchase?
That's only because MSFT already lost massively. this is one of those things that slashdot was divided over. a court loss for MSFT or feeding yet another patent troll.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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!
So if Youtube rewrites their site in XML, instead of HTML, they won't be infringing?
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.
Now anybody can see what you did and how. Patents are as much a learning tool as they are an economic engine.
That's the sentence where you stuck your foot in it. How many hundreds of thousands of programmers on the planet? OK, now how many programmers search the patent database for ideas they can buy before coding? 100,000? 1,000? Can you name me even 10? Where is the Eclipse plug-in for searching the patent database for relevant algorithms? Where is the panoply of web startups offering an online search tool that locates the patented algorithms that will help you get your next project done faster if you license them?
When it comes to software, patents have had half their faces blown off. They no longer function at all as a learning tool, or even as an economic engine for a hard-working programmer/inventor to profit from their non-obvious invention/algorithm. With much of their original, intended functionality rendered useless, patents (most especially in the realm of software) have long since passed the point where they offer society more costs than benefits. They are almost entirely the tool of large companies, lawyers, and those who sell services to inventors gullible enough to believe we still live in an age where patents work the way you describe.
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