Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" cf levels on Physiology and Safety.
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.
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.
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.