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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.'"
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
Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" cf levels on Physiology and Safety.
Maslow never proposed a social utopia where all of his D-needs were met by society or government. In fact, he describes self-actualization as a "motivator", i.e. what makes people achieve more success in life for themselves. His theories are generally accepted as theories of personality and motivation, not social or societal ideals.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
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. ;)
George Orwell was an ardent socialist you ignorant fool. He went to Spain to fight the fascists.
Communism did none of those things, totalitarian states did. Do you blame capitalism for the death squads the Shah of Iran used after the CIA put him back in power?
Would you like diet education? because it looks like that is what you got.
Maslow's first level is breathing, food, water, etc. His second level includes employment, health, and property.
He assumes you actually have a functional society before you start wondering about self-esteem and stuff.
Sure, he doesn't say we should build a social Utopia provided by a magically government. But, he would probably say that a Feudal system, for example, wouldn't even have his top two D-needs.
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
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.
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.
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.