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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.
It is not reasonable to allow spurious or unfounded litigations simply because the target does so themselves.
:)
That would set a very bad precedent.
Now as to this case, I have no idea if it's a load of b.s. since I can't seem to get the article to load.
Maybe it got slashdotted.
Personally, I'm sick of the software patent scams, just slap them back to copyrights like it used to be.
As long as we're wishing for things, eliminate business patents also.
'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."
Given that the defendants are also ridiculously litigious about software patents,
Every case like this that is lost by the defendants serves to further legitimize this type of patent. If they win this, any project using Ajax is at risk, including many popular FOSS forum and CMS packages. So you'll pardon me if I'm less than enthusiastic about this, regardless of who is defending.
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 use of asynchronous communication with the server is one of the sub-claims. The actual "invention" that they filed is a browser that can download programs, and run them in such a way that the program can communicate with the browser for I/O. That is AJAX, but also Javascript in general. It's also any Java applet, Flash applet or in fact, any applet of any kind.
They claim that they have invented the idea of executable applets, in any language or implementation. And after the Microsoft victory their legal position looks quite strong. I would assume that the only way the targets in this round can beat this is by tying the suits together and trying to get the patents dismissed on the grounds that they are overly broad.
There was no specific invention in the patent - but they stumbled onto a very general idea that is the basis for the entire internet 15 years later. The argument needs to be along the lines that no one company should be allowed to own a patent on technology that it actually took the entire industry 15 years to develop.
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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.
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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.
>>> 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.
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?