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Eolas Sues World + Dog For AJAX Patent
helfrich9000 writes "Eolas has filed suit against 23 companies (guess where), including Adobe, Amazon.com, Apple, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, JPMorgan, and Playboy. At issue are a pair of patents (US 7,599,985 and US 5,838,906), one of which (the '906) was successfully used in litigation against Microsoft Corp for a $565 million judgement. Says Dr. Michael D. Doyle, chairman of Eolas, 'We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources. Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair.'"
Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair.
There is ridiculous dishonesty in this assertion.
Of course profiting off someone else's work is unfair. Nothing about what the litigant or the defendants have done or will do relates in any way with "fair". If the world were "fair" every single human would have as an inalienable right free access to decent food, housing, healthcare, and security and working beyond that would be an optional choice to better their life. Humanity is far, far from this ideal, and everything we do now in the business world is *nothing* about fair, it is about power and capital, and having long chains of other humans working for the profit of those few who have learned how to escape or work the system. Remember more than half of your planet's population still farms their food by hand, and dies in large numbers when there are droughts.
"Profiting from someone else's innovation" is at the very basic essence of working capitalism. It an the assumption driving nearly all investment. Using capital to buy a stock, and having that stock rise in value, has the effect of making a profit off the wealth creation and innovation in that company. I don't take a position for or against that system it is highly efficient, when it works, at allocating resources and creating significant development.
But even beyond the nature of business and profit, these folks have gone down into the depths of corporate IP litigation, where the idealistic light of "fair" shines like smelly dirt. Lawsuits rarely have much to do with a high notion of justice; they are what you can pay for, and what you can win. To assert that ones actions are about "fair" when filing a corporate IP litigation lawsuit is patently absurd and frankly laughable.
Oh, and money. Lots of money. In fact, forget the fair thing, and give us the money.
then the 17 years of protection by the patents is pretty much over. And if they published this information before they filed the patent then it's now in public domain anyways.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Given that the defendants are also ridiculously litigious about software patents, I say more power to Eolas. I think the whole idea of software patents is absurd anyway but if there is going to be pain suffered by anyone then it needs to be suffered by all. Adobe, Amazon.com, Apple, eBay, Google, Yahoo!, JPMorgan, and Playboy are all probably really saddened by the fact that they didn't come up with this themselves quicker.
It's a good thing I have a patent on patent trolling, because I'm going to be able to sue these guys for millions.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
And if they published this information before they filed the patent then it's now in public domain anyways. LoB
I believe in the US you are allowed to file one year after you publish. In Europe I believe this is not the case
SSC
Why don't we create an industry funded board whose job is to make sure that silly software patents are no longer awarded? Oh wait... The industry only dislikes SOME software patents, while anyone who cares to look will see that all software patents threaten innovation and are largely anti-competitive because they rig the game in favor of big corporations. Unfortunately, software patents have become the last hurdle that the proprietary world can throw at the free software movement. Moglen and Lessig are both very persuasive (If you got a bit of free time, read "Free Culture" by the latter) I hope that upon hearing their arguments European Commission will be wise enough to reconsider its position on software patents.
Looks to me like they patented distributed computing embedded into a web browser. Anyone have more background on the patents (I lost interest in trying to interpret patent-speak after page 3 or so of their patent application). It seems to be merely abstracting a technology seen in mainframes and mainframe clients (remote computing), into what could be described as the biggest mainframe in the world (the internet).
This is great, because the problem is not Eolas, it's the patent system. Congress will never fix it until their corporate masters are in pain.
... otherwise we could have had a chance of removing this godawful AJAX UI for good.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
then the 17 years of protection by the patents is pretty much over.
Don't worry. They've taken that into account and will now only pretty much sue the pants off those companies.
And if they published this information before they filed the patent then it's now in public domain anyways.
In some jurisdictions. From BitLaw:
One of the most important lessons to learn from this requirement is that there is a one year period after the first pbulic [sic] dislcosure or offer for sale of an invention during which a patent application must be filed. [...] Although the United States grants the one year grace period described in the last two rules above, most other countries do not grant such a period.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
'We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources.
Bullshit
Show me the web site that you made providing an interactive web app back in 1994, only one year after the web was even invented.
Don't have one? No one did? Thought as much...
From my perspective, one of the key advantages to open source software is it will make busting these kinds of patents a whole lot easier. There's almost certainly prior art somewhere for nearly every software patent on the books, but it's all in unsearchable proprietary code that may or may not have been deleted years ago. As more code gets added to sourceforge and other repositories it's going to get a lot easier to say "Hey, this thing you patented was done twenty years ago in an obscure open source project nobody uses anymore. And I can prove it."
I don't get it -_-
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
by Google http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&btnG=Search&q=cache:http://imvivo.com/DetailsView/tabid/104/IndexID/1779944/Default.aspx
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/2055214/Eolas-To-Sue-Apple-Google-and-21-Others?from=rss
What I wonder is, we've had little information since. Reactions from the companies involved in the suit? I only heard that GoDaddy released a statement "We're not guilty and we'll defend ourselves vigorously". The other companies have withheld comment.
The earlier patent gets 17 years from the date of issue, which was in 1998 (so it expires in 2015 as long as they pay their maintenance fees), because it was filed before June 8, 1995 and gets the longer of 17 years from issue or 20 years from filing.
Ironically, the later-filed patent gets 20 years from the earliest date of filing, i.e., the date at which the earlier-filed application was filed (because the later-filed patent is a continuation of a continuation of the earlier-filed patent), which means it expires in 2014.
Of course, the later-filed patent has a patent term adjustment of about four years, so it actually expires in 2018.
I hope this clears things up for you. ;)
There is no Dog corporation in the lawsuit
Commonly used patented technologies that didn't got enforced for a few years should lose their patented status and fall under public domain. This is plain common sense. The best examples are FAT technologies, which most of the world embedded stuff use. Why should MS let everybody use it for years than once if got global domination try to enforce the patent on everybody and cash in. That's just evil. (Patent trolls are evil, but they shouldn't exist first, that's because of the boggus patent system in the US).
The news story was dated October 6, and I'm pretty sure I remember reading about it in Slashdot a couple of months ago. Anyway, Mike loves jerking the chain of the legal system. I'm making popcorn.
I invented the name "Eolas" for a story I wrote in 1972 (6th grade).
All their base are belong to me.
Nobody else can get any money for doing this type of thing ever again then right?
What a sad, pathetic joke we in the USA are subjecting the world to when a patent such as "US 7,599,985 " exists.
In short, it is basically defining the interaction of a computer with a server.
This is exactly the same as if I were able to patent the idea of 'placing one foot in front of the other in order to achieve motion'
I am open source, and Linux baby!
When the playing field is completely level than you can preach to me about "stealing the fruits of my neighbors".
A couple of months after Mosaic browser was publicised.
Does that count?
It used a tcl/tk app to draw vector topographic maps. The tcl/tk app
commanded the mosaic browser to fetch data for the map, and to
display accompanying text info in its browser window, changing the
text depending on clicks in different locations on the map.
It seemed f'ing obvious at the time.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Patents last 20 years from the date of filing. If they are alleging these companies have been violating their patents for some time then it doesn't really matter when the patents expire unless they settle with a licensing agreement
Greed is an inherent part of human nature
So is intelligence.
Using intelligence to moderate greed is not the same a communism.
Lassez-faire is not an ultimate truth. If it were, then we would have private police, unregulated tobacco, and the supermarket could sell you anything that looked like meat without any regulations at all. That is a recipe for a crime and public health disaster.
The question is not the removal of all regulations, but understanding when regulations are needed. History is *full* of examples of the evils of unregulated markets. Even Alan Greenspan as backed off from that ideology -- and he was the "wizard", and chief high-priest of that position -- and an extraordinarily intelligent man.
Human beings are more than just selfish greedy individuals. We are capable or more than that -- and that is NOT communism OR socialism.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
... for the last 15 years and didn't notice that, well, every damn company on the web was violating their patent. You should only be able to claim damages from the time you file a suit. Sorry you waited until now to get off your asses and do something about it.
The world is a better place thanks to Eolas, inventors of the Hypnotoad.
As always, I don't represent you and this post is not legal advice, and does not represent the views or opinions of my firm, or its partners, yadda yadda.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Is it really possible for a company to wait until everyone is using technology which they patented, and then go after everyone for using it without paying them? I mean, no one even knew Eolas had this did they?
I know this "defense" thing usually is only applicable to trademarks, but really. I couldn't think of a more despicable thing than waiting in the shadows until everyone uses a (supposedly) free technology that didn't even originate from their company, and then striking when everyone is using it. Shame on them.
Who is going to shop at a supermarket that sold bad meat if the public is properly informed?
The problem with your argument is that there is such a thing as a captive market.
100 years ago, you could not buy sanitary meat. It was impossible. The government brought in regulations, and everyone celebrated.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
But block all internet traffic to/from east Texas and never sell a product there. You can't get sued there if you don't do business there. And it would serve the idiots there right to be stuck with 30 year old products.
Money for nothing and chicks for free. This technology is an obvious no-brainer that computers do. Their "hard work" is really other peoples "hard work". They did not invent anything new. Its a bit like breathing in air when you are born. You've never done it before, but at some point you could say you invented it (and make everyone else pay), when in truth, its the really obvious thing to do at the time, and there was no 'hard work' involved at all. This highlights in neon exactly why the US patent system is broken. These people get a patent, then sit back, wait for people to start being successful, then bang! hit them up for all the bucks they can get. Do they innovate further? HELL NO! They sit on a beach, call their lawyers and order another rum cooler! Their innovation shifts toward soaking whoever they can for all they can. The US patent system is broken. Really broken. Instead of doing real research and innovation, the USPTO allows this kind of crap to be called 'innovation' and overpriced American companies soak each other on trivialities. In the meantime, real research and innovation heads to China and India. When they start innovating, (and their reply to US companies wanting to horn in will sound a lot like Chuck You Farley), the American century will be firmly and fully over. The American dream will be 'The Chinese dream' and 'The Indian Dream', with Americans wondering where it all went. Americans for the last 20 years have been wondering where it all went, but for the first time, American companies will be wondering it too. See what greed and self interest above all else gets you?
This should be a Wake up call to the US patent office and others like it. Patents need to be reviewed by experts in the respective fields to which they belong. (it is obvious that they are not due to these patents). Its another patent that should have NEVER been approved!!! How much money does the US goverment make from this process , any clue, because at the point when 20+ companies are being sued over patents which should have never been issued then in my view the only people actually profiting heavily are the winners of the lawsuits and the lawyers. I am sick of this, I have rather interesting views of what socialism is about (I was born in the UK and lived a dual-culture life (between the US and UK) for many years and at this grand age of my late thrifty I am becoming of the possibly immature view that governments seem to spending more time screwing things up with their wonderful ideas (good examples, the national health system mess in the UK (partially due to Microsoft contractors), The inability for mothers trying to collect child support in the UK (another microsoft contractor cock-up), the absolutely silly and arcane laws which get passed limiting our online freedoms, and finally the stupid patents). Is this where our hard-earned tax dollars are going????? Are people working hard so that Mr. Dumbarse MP or Senator retard can pass dumb laws. Are people working hard on legimate technologies only to be used for things that they never should have to be worried about in the first place. And finally how much is it costing the taxpayer, Its enough to make you want to demand that you get to allocate where your taxes get spent instead of writing your respective government a blank check. Enough is Enough, USPTO, Get a ******* clue! I've had enough myself, its frustrating to read about. In a time of global economic crisis it seems the goverments involved are doing a poor job at not only protecting the everyday citizen but also the larger businesses as well. I am not advocating Anarchy, but something huge needs to change here. How and why I am sure is going to hopefully spawn many comments and insults!
My first computer had 1024 bytes of ram
"Bullshit" is insightful? I guess that makes "Nuh uh" bordering on genius
I think there's a good argument that a javascript engine isn't "separate" from the browser these days. It's so tightly integrated that the end user certainly can't pry it apart. I see a much better argument for Eolas going after anything that calls on Flash, Quicktime, or WMP, for example. Then again, *everyone* (and their dogs) uses AJAX, so I guess it's worth their money to make the argument.
While I'm partly satisfied that each of these companies is now paying for their short-sighted support of software patents, any legitimacy to software patents is bad for the industry as a whole. Sadly, this example wil most likely lead these companies to shore up their own patent defenses rather than realize the error of their ways.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
If you aren't careful, some idiot will now go to all sorts of extremes to prove Vannevar didn't invent Javascript. It will be just like the misquote attributed to Al Gore about inventing the Internet. You do realize that, a thousand years from now, this will have been garbled to where everyone 'knows' Algore really did invent the net, and the Algore-ythms that primitive computers used, as the very name proves. Oh, and the Chinese discovered both America and the Moon. they'll keep repeating those claims until everyone 'knows' them too.
Who is John Cabal?
I dunno - whenever I see a patent lawsuit filed in eastern texas district, I always get suspicious that perhaps the company doesn't actually have a strong patent suit. The original suit MS lost was filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Software patents are annoying as hell.
In fact, I'm betting that before Microsoft payed half a billion dollars to settle the suit, they probably scoured the world for invalidating prior art.
Established companies knowingly pay huge amounts on dubious claims just to raise the barrier to entry of their turf. In the long run 0.5 bill is not a big sum for Microsoft. Further there are likely to be silent undisclosed deals specifying that a huge portion of the pay out should be used exclusively to enforce the widest claims of the patent on all violations fingered by Microsoft. There is a precedent for that.
A bunch of automobile manufacturers voluntarily recognized a dubious patent, bought the patent and used it to shut down competition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Licensed_Automobile_Manufacturers
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They're trying to patent client/server communications, except over the internet! It's a painfully obvious approach and their patent should (idealistically) not hold water, due to it being completely obvious. You might try submitting your app as evidence in one of the big suits to revoke their patent. We're all interested parties here, and really anything that can be done to eliminate this obvious patent troll would be fighting The Good Fight IMO.
Who knows, maybe the judges in these cases will see the light and throw Eolas out of court. One can dream.
Dude, you're really full of yourself.
> As always, I don't represent you and this post is not legal advice, and does not represent the views or opinions of my firm, or its partners, yadda yadda.
This is already in your fucking sig. Ok, I know some lawyers, and you're all paranoid about getting sued. You don't need to say this in your post too. Nobody is going to sue you, or your fucking firm. Get over yourself.
Come on people, the fair is where they have chickens and goats and pigs n such. Otherwise there is not a damn thing in this world that is fair. Don't use that !#!%^@$# word around me.
...recent reports have surfaced that the grandson of great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great GrandCaveFather Unga Balunga holds the patent of the circular device we call a "wheel". Lawsuits are apparently forthcoming against every manufacturer, to include Goodyear, Firestone, and Pirelli, as well as Microsoft, for their use of a ball-driven mouse...
Hey, what the hell, why not? We seem to like going back decades for lawsuits these days, what's a few thousand years in this grand money sucking schema of things?
Son of a...Will someone please get this lawyer off my doorstep. For fucks sake man I was joking.
When is this insanity going to stop? Does anyone else get the feeling like these guys are just yelling "I thought of it first! It's mine!" like a child would? On the other hand, isn't this extortion for money? "Use our 'idea', and we'll come and get you!" This whole 'money' concept is really getting out of hand when people can be sued for being creative. Can any law savvy person tell me how the patent system takes into account the possibility that two people, with no relation to each other, can reasonable come up with the same idea at the same time? I mean, presented with a common 'problem', it makes total sense that two people would come up with the same solution. So what if someone had it first, that doesn't make it his. Like North America, Christopher Columbus found it 'first', but there were other people here, and we destroyed them, and we still claim this land as our own. Haven't we learned our lesson yet? 'Property' is NOT working.
> That's because at my core I am a greedy self-serving animal. The only difference between me and the apes is that I horde money instead of food. You'll never change this.
FTFY. You speak only for yourself. You are also dead wrong.
I used to be a libertarian too, with a card and everything. Then I realized that I don't live in a vacuum, my peer group is actually the entirety of mankind, and there is no "other". Communism as implemented was flawed, to understate it, but to hold capitalism up as the best we can manage while simultaneously portraying humans as incapable of evolving beyond our basest instincts is perverse, to make another understatement.
If you're going to reference Sci-Fi, at least quote a good author:
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
"The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own 'national security' to be paramount above all other consideration. [...] There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity. "
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
-- Isaac Asimov
E pluribus unum
Did you publish it at all to the public and do you have any evidence? Otherwise it's not going to be very helpful.
You know, HyperCard? The program that in 1986 allowed you to "embed external content in a hypermedia document". Eight years before you filed this patent.
In the late 80's did a photo/video search interface in HyperCard that pulled visual content from an external database program (4D), as well as interacting with a full-text index apllication over a network running on a PC.
Hear's to hoping that Apple spanks them by filing for a re-examination of their patent.
No sig, sorry.
http://www.w3.org/2003/10/27-rogan.html
No need for scouring, Tim Berners-Lee already did it.
But you see no difference between socialism and capitalism? Your "knowing jack" doesn't seem a high threshold.
I'd ask Eolas to show their technologies that they demonstrated widely over 15 years ago. If they're trying to sue the pants off of everyone for copying their demo, they should have it handy.
I made a webapp in early 2001 that used both AJAX (with a hidden frame for client-server communication, rather than an XHR) and a Java applet. It was used to create presentations from within a web browser. The Java applet was used for laying out a presentation slide, providing the user with the capability to create/position elements of the presentation (text, images, and so forth). The app was operational more than a year before the filing date of US7599985.
The application made use of Netscape's LiveConnect (an old Java/JavaScript communication API) to do this. LiveConnect was introduced in 1997, with Netscape 4. As far as I can see, LiveConnect was designed to enable what this patent claims to invent.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveConnect and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
Congratulations, you now owe them $20M, you should have kept quiet about it. And when they threaten to begin discovery and reveal all of your pr0n IP history in court and to your wife you will settle out of court. Dirty companies with dirty lawyers play dirty games.
"one of which (the '906) was successfully used in litigation against Microsoft Corp for a $565 million judgement." (sic)
This isn't clear from the article, but other sources indicate that the judgment in question was overturned on appeal, and the case then settled out of court, presumably, for a lesser, but still staggering amount of money.
AJAX is just client server fancied up a little bit. There's no real difference architecturally between a 1985 FoxPro application and a 2008 AJAX application, except that the AJAX application will be slower but scale to a million users and have prettier fonts and worse reporting.
This is my sig.
They didn't invent/implement Javascript.
They didn't invent/implement DOM-based document markup specifications.
They didn't invent/implement Dynamic HTML capable browsers.
They didn't invent/implement threaded asynchronous XMLHTTPRequest() functions.
They didn't invent/implement XML or JSON data abstraction specifications.
Yeah, it would be a real shame if someone profited from someone elses innovation.
then the 17 years of protection by the patents is pretty much over. And if they published this information before they filed the patent then it's now in public domain anyways. LoB
Oblig XKCD. Most recent one in fact.
There is a legal term for this... Oh yes, negligence.
There's a better word: laches. It's the word that a lot of Slashdot posers who think they know the difference between a copyright and a trademark forget about. Laches is an equitable estoppel for a plaintiff's delay in bringing legal action where such delay harms the defendant.
Animated GIF? Web page executes in a browser causing the browser to perform additional I/O (the IMG SRC tag) to the server to retrieve an application (the GIF file) and executes it. (Animated GIF files contain a "program" of sorts that specify what images to decompress in what order and how long to display them.) How long has GIF been around?
If they win the case, the fair thing would bpe to share the money to poor people.
Shit, and we *still* don't have click-addressable vector graphics in web browsers.
If you can prove that app existed via promotional videos, published works, etc., it could serve as prior art. I imaging proving is the hard part.
Table-ized A.I.
Now all you have to do is offer to sell that app to all those companies for half of what Eolas wants!
>>> We developed these technologies over 15 years ago .... Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair... All we want is what's fair.'"
15 years is too long for a software patent to last. Eolas had more than enough opportunity in that time to capitalise and recover R&D costs on any software technology by making a real product. Eolas didn't ever do anything using this technology so is provably just patent trolling.
Whats fair is that the patent office should remove patent rights from owners not actively developing or marketing provably available products within a certain time period, otherwise they're just allowing troll companies to hold the whole tech world back from developing.
The only thing that will save our patent system now is for the big boys to get repeatedly dinged with massive patent troll judgements.
That'll get them using their lobbying power properly.
expandfairuse.org
I don't see where either patent references the Web in its mention of a "browser." The MacOS, Windows, and UNIX operating systems all have file "browsers" that pre-date these patents. In such file browsers, an icon (embedded object reference) can be selected that opens a local or remote application. In college, back in '91, I remember opening an application hosted on a remote Macintosh computer by clicking on the icon for that application in the local Macintosh's file "browser." From that point forward, the application was sent over AppleTalk to the local machine to be run as expected. If we consider the opening of the remote application's window on the local/client machine to be defined by the remote application, then the graphics portion of the patents are covered as well.
Not related, but... stop outsourcing USA labor, collect income tax from outsourced USA labor, or start outsourcing USA management and see how they like it... because outsourcing isn't helping our country's workers. It might help if we actually start using our hands and start building some of our own technology in the USA again too. What are the odds that your next mobile phone will be built in Asia? Why don't we make anything in our own country anymore? If we look at it from the salary side, then I guess we should all be moving into cardboard shacks to compete with our outsourcing counterparts, but we're not... and we probably don't want to. If they had our same quality of life, do you think they would still be charging cheaper rates? The USA has become a 3rd world service industry nation... and our tech industry leaders aren't helping matters because their companies build and package more and more overseas. When your body is losing blood, you shouldn't care about getting a cheaper watch at the Asian Emporium. You should be worrying about how to stop the bleeding. I love my quality of life. I don't want to live in a cardboard shack!!
:)))))
Between my sputtering and aching belly, I almost feel sorry for the yanks with their patent mess. Then I remember what life would be like without this comedy going on across the pond...
The company did, at one point, make some browser based off of NCSA mosaic, and they did bring their portfolio to Microsoft in the early 90's, who turned it down, so I can see how they got the ruling against Microsoft.
That said, I think there will be a difference, from the viewpoint of the court, between suing a company that made money distributing a web browser and a company that is simply implementing a web page. At this point, EOLAS is like a gambler who just won the jackpot at the slot machines and doesn't know when to quit.
Oh, I wish I had mod points today.
This is the first time I've seen that angle discussed.
(I'm still in the "please get ajax off slashdot" camp though, as it doesn't play nice with my netbook.)
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if there were something as obvious as the patent freakin' expired already or there was an obvious bar date, Microsoft's lawyers probably would have picked up on it.
Just because the patent has expired, does not mean you are not able to sue someone for infringing on it while it was still active.
Depends. First, does your app meet the requirements of one of the sections of 35 U.S.C. 102 or 35. U.S.C. 103? Note that "known or used by others" in 102(a) requires public use. Second, does your app, perhaps combined with other prior art, perform ALL the steps of one of the patent claims? Looking at claim 1 of the '906 patent for instance I'd guess not, based on your description. Third, can you show that your app predates the date of conception of the '906 patent? That was filed in 1994, the date of conception could be substantially earlier.
If you can show all these things, congratulations, you may have found prior art! Now send it to the PTO for re-exam so Eolas can slightly amend a few claims and get around it. Aren't patents great?
Why yes, as a matter of fact I am a patent attorney. How'd you know?
I was a Vantive user and was involved in rolling out their support application in a tech support shop way back in the day prior to the web really getting rolling. Their original client server technology stored the presentation layer and validation bits of the application in the database and then the client would interpret that downloaded code. It meant that just like AJAX you very rarely had to update your client and the UI was generally snappy. That was in 95 and I think it had been around for a number of years even then. Vantive was bought by Peoplesoft and then swallowed by Oracle, I'm quite surprised that MS wasn't able to get the patent invalidated but maybe they didn't know about Vantive.
Communism implies the subordination of the individual to the state. In a true communist society there is no concept of private ownership. All assets, including human capital are owned by the state. If you don't see how much a system is inherently incompatible with freedom, liberty and individuality then we are probably too far apart to have a meaningful dialog on the issue.
All assets are owned by the state anyways. Yes, even in the USA. Your problem is that you don't realize it.
You don't own your house, even if it doesn't have a mortgage against it. Property tax. You rent it from the state. Stop paying your property tax and what do they do? Put a lien on your house. Kick you out. Sell it for the back taxes. Still think you own your home? You don't.
Eminent domain. They can take your house anyways even if you do pay your taxes. Or a business interest can do it if they persuade (read that as "pay") the local government and make a compelling argument they could bring in more tax revenue with your property than you can.
Mineral rights. You can lose your home if there is something interesting buried under it.
Bankruptcy court. If you don't pay your taxes they'll sell your car, your computer, even your shoes. It all comes out in the audit, and if the powers that be decide you owe them money they'll take anything you think you own and sell it in a Sheriff's sale.
Forfeiture laws. Even if you have a pocket full of bills they can claim you are probably up to something and declare the money itself guilty of a crime and take it. They don't like it when you sidestep banks and have money they can't track, count, and make you pay tax on. They can take your car, your boat, anything you own for any reason at all.
The only reason you own anything you currently have right now is because the government hasn't said otherwise at the moment. They can change their minds anytime they like and take anything they want. Legally. You don't own jack.
Subordination of the individual to the state? Hell. The great bulk of humanity has never been free and never will be. Not here, not there, not anywhere.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
So they want to profit off technologies like Javascript and HTML, and for the even bigger picture web browsers? Talk about hypocrites.
Apple Developed OpenDoc in 1992 the above patent was filed in 1994
The basic idea of OpenDoc was to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provided a framework in which these components could run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component. These documents could then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks would substitute suitable components for each part, even if they were from different vendors.[2]
what part of applications over a network doesn't OpenDoc fit?
I find it interesting that Sun is on this list. They invent Java, which morphs and ends up in the hands of a patent holder. Then they get sued. Brilliant.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Sounds to me like Google totally ripped you off! You should definitively sue.
Nothing funny about this thread... /. takes copyright very seriously.
Every arm-chair capatalist knows that everyone else pays for the police who should NEVER stop them from doing anything just everyone else.
Watch Fox-news, you will get the idea soon enough. All drunk-drivers should be stopped, but not if they need their car for business. All illegal immigrants should be kicked out, except their cleaning lady. Everyone should pay for schooling, but their school has to be free and no raises for teachers, ever. Think Homer Simpson, a parody people, not a role-model.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just imagine, the roads being maintained by Microsoft. The FDA run by Apple. The city water utility by IBM.
If you know nothing about history, then I suppose those ideas might appeal. To those of use with a brain, it is a nightmare.
IBM would decide that a watertap is only worthwhile selling to big business, not to individual consumers.
Microsoft would make roads only drivable by Ford cars and then only the current model.
Apple would come up with legaleese to tell you that should your stomach explode, they are in a no way to blaim.
No, somethings are meant to operate slowly and ineffciently. If society was run efficient, we would raise all kids in centralized institutions and kill old people once they are no longer productive. I take my goverment lumbering, out of date and inefficient thank you very much. For the alternative, see 1939-1945 and current day China.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And if they published this information before they filed the patent then it's now in public domain anyways.
Publishing your information before you patent it does not, itself, put it in the public domain. It does, however, give a certain level of proof to when you had it, pertinent to claims of prior art.
Ideas and information (including music, video and software) are abundant by nature, ergo they are not subject to the same scarcity rules that apply for other goods. The only way to make them scarce is through coercion by force. This coercion is exerted by government on all us so we accept their view of intellectual property as such, for the sake of large private consortia that pays them to do it. As long as the industrial governments insist on intellectual property beyond commercial brands, we'll not be truly free.
these kind of shit almost exclusively happens in america, due to the shitty patent and copyright system. tag is missing.
Read radical news here
Seems to me that the economic tradeoff of sw patenting in the US will kill the US IT business in the long run (or maybe not so long at all...).
Continous patent fights will drive home market SW costs through the roof, while the rest of the world happily innovates and moves on.
I presume that when all lawyers and greedy sueers are over and done fighting most existing 20th century IP, they will find that most interesting 21st century stuff is being made in other countries and that there's no market footprint left over for US companies...
I could be wrong though, I'm no economist, but it seems so entirely obvious...
15 years ago “AJAX” was not technically possible with any of the major browser. Not even elegant (or nasty) tricks. I know, because I tried!
Only when browsers gained the ability to either communicate with a Java applet, which then communicated with the server (because of the lack of a real DOM, this was very crude back then), or the ability to change the content of a page inside a object tag (only possible with a bit of DOM), was it that this was possible at all.
I don’t remember the exact date, but I was one of the first to do it. I had to do it all by myself. Because nobody on the net did even remotely know what I was talking about.
But you can check when those API parts were implemented by Netscape and Microsoft. This was definitely less than 15 years ago. More like 5-10.
And back then, we did not call it AJAX. It was not even XML. It was a simple server communication channel. Or “network driver”, in my “browser OS”.
But we all knew, that this would be patent trolling, so...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I must be misunderstanding you...
You seem to be suggesting that someone with no self-esteem is worse off than someone who is the deceased victim of some deranged Thomas Harris-styled lunatic serial killer?
That's really going to help raise their opinion of themselves.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
If there's any good prior art to use against these patents, it's not likely to be something that the Slashdot Army of Armchair Lawyers is going to come up with off the top of their heads. It's more likely to be some thesis published by the University of Zimbabwe with exactly one copy sitting in their library just waiting to be discovered.
Who is more likely to stumble across that thesis in Zimbabwe - some layers in Redmond (scanning some databases filled with things known from other patents) or an army of slashdot-readers scattered all over the world (possibly including the one who wrote it)?
There are 442 comments on this article at the time I write this, and no one has written the word, "Bilski." All I want to know is whether that case could impact this one. Is it possible that this case could finally force the courts to say that it's not possible to patent software at all?
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Patent US5838906
Abstract:
In other words, the patent is on the entire concept of embedding objects in a browser. I think this illustrates perfectly some of the faults of software patents: 1) It is a concept for an invention, not an actual invention; 2) It is a re-statement of general practices and patterns (remote procedure call; client/server; interactive user interface) that only looks new because it is being re-applied to another technology (browsers, in this case); 3) It is over-broad in scope, covering not a particular invention but an entire class of inventions; 4) It is general in execution, not requiring any specific device or implementation.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Seriously, are we done yet? If I called for patents on what I created in the past two decades, the hell would be immense. I do not as I call the solutions self evident, just as the patent’s that is being discussed are.
Cripes, I here by call dibs on the patent for extending digits into ones nostril for dried mucus removal.
Software patents. What a joke.
And on that note, If Mr. Taco (or who ever) would please add the pass through of obvious text formating without having to embed HTML gliph's, I would apreciate it.
If you can show all these things, congratulations, you may have found prior art! Now send it to the PTO for re-exam so Eolas can slightly amend a few claims and get around it. Aren't patents great?
No, they aren't.
Why yes, as a matter of fact I am a patent attorney. How'd you know?
The stink is a dead giveaway.
The only thing that will save our patent system now is for the big boys to get repeatedly dinged with massive patent troll judgements.
Unfortunately, the big boys have the resources to withstand repeated "dinging" as a "cost of doing business". In return, the patent system is an excellent insurance policy against the proverbial "one guy in a garage could put us out of business" scenario.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
If you look at the patent, it says the assignee is the University of California. Presumably Doyle filed the patent while there? Then Eolas bought the patent rights? Seems so from his bio: http://www.eolas.com/about_us.html.
So he developed this patent while working for a publicly funded University as "Director for the Center for Knowledge Management".
Web browser making requests to web server is just the 1990s+ version of mainframe terminal making requests to a mainframe. The difference is a one-to-few relationship becomes a one-to-many relationship. IBM terminals (and some others) understand page layout, and things like form elements. What we really need to defeat is "...on the internet" patents, and that's essentially what this is given the similarity to mainframes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wanted to let everyone know I received a patent in 1995 that states that I invented the idea of displaying text in a browser in paragraph format. Anyone who profited from my invention owes me money.
What WWII British ship, along with HMS Exeter and HMNZS Achillies, defeated the German pocket Battleship Graf Spee in 1939?
Seriously? As others have already mentioned, the private sector has only one interest...maximizing profit. You only have to go as far as looking at your local cable company to see "private sector efficiency" in action.
If the DOT were run by a private company, all roads would be tolled....heavily. You would have to pay lots of extra fees like "exit ramp usage fees". If you wanted to go to another state, you'd have to purchase a "subscription" to use those roads. You'd only be allowed to drive certain kinds of cars on those roads....those from car companies that have made cross-licensing agreements with the road companies (and those cars would cost quite a bit more then too). Safety concerns would take a back seat to profits (i.e. unsafe conditions would only be fixed if the costs of lawsuits outweigh the costs of repairs). And you can totally forget about aesthetics....cheap and ugly is what all your roads would look like. etc....etc...
So sure, from a pure efficiency standpoint, the private sector can do things more effectively and efficiently than government. But in the end, consumers still end up paying more from services provided by the private sector. The only time this isn't true is when prices are strictly controlled by government (e.g. here in North Carolina, electric rate hikes must be approved by the state). But then that's considered governmental interference in the marketplace, right?
> No, because nobody put a rhetorical gun to the sellers head and told him to sell the car or go to jail.
But those little green pieces of paper are only valuable because we have to pay taxes with them (which puts the rhetorical gun to one's head). Sorry, though. I don't agree with the "taxes == theft" mantra of crazy libertarians, though. They have no problem mooching off of the roads, schools, etc. that we all pay for, they just want to get out of having to support them.
Hmm
1) Eastern District of Texas
2) Continuation patent
3) "On the Internet" patent
OK, stop there... confirmed patent troll.
Anyone else read "Legolas sues World + Dog" ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
... when these wankers start drying off from old age and find themselves in front of the Gates of Hell (TM).
Other than that, I hope the patents are challenged and that each and every one of them are invalidated, with Eolas getting hit for fees, etc. Bunch of blood sucking psychopaths.
Maybe now large companies will start understanding why software patents are bad.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I marvel at the Eolas contribution to society every time I have to click into a control in order to interact with it. Then I usually suck my tounge, sigh and say Eolas instead of a less-vulgar curse.
I had to wade through 100+ posts debating capitalism vs libertarianism vs communism vs socialism before finding even one post mentioning the lawsuit this topic is supposed to be about. Why do I even bother reading this site anymore?
These patents are egregious. I worked for a decade at Data Resources, Inc., a leading timesharing firm. We had the concept of executable code inside documents more than twenty years ago. EPS largely created by Bob Lacey was years ahead of its time. In 1983 with Visicorp we shipped VisiLink and DataKits for the Apple II. VisiLink installed on the Apple II. The user filled out a form downloaded from the Burroughs mainframe. Connectivity was via a dial-up modem. Billing was by credit card. Requests were fulfilled by running a program unique to each form on the mainframe using as arguments the entries in the form. What was delivered to the Apple II was a VisiCalc spreadsheet to be executed on the Apple II in VisiCalc. I still have a retail package. Almost everything Eolas claims is covered by EPS and VisiLink/DataKits. Maybe everything. I tried to help Microsoft in their suit, going so far as to send some documentation to their attorneys who I reached by calling Steve Ballmer. The attorneys decided to take a different path in fighting the patents and never used it.
So, help me with corroboration or a contrary assessment: what caused these ridiculous lines? I was told by aforementioned Soviets that it was done to subdue the people.
Thank you for your insight. You command an interesting mind and heart.