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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 means that, once again, the USPTO's employee drug-testing policy has failed us all.
No, they are the bad guy. The laws suck, and the guys using the laws to hold the software world hostage to moronic demands are bad guys.
What I'm finally waiting for is the other shoe to drop and guys like Microsoft to finally admit that software patents are just plain bad. The industry is becoming increasingly hostile to new development.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Eolas is not the bad guy here, they're just doing what is legally possible. You can't condemn a company for following the law, just because it seems wrong.
Morality is not defined by law.
Slave owners were not the bad guys, they were just doing what was legally possible...
...
--frank[at]unternet.org
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.
Microsoft did admit it. In an internal memo Bill Gates wrote in 1991:
"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today."
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!
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!
I'm sorry, but that infringes on my patent #401005666 "A method for eliminating third party organisations or persons engaged in activities likely to affect the capital value of a business"
AT&ROFLMAO