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.'"

Comments

laughable

[drDugan]

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.

Re:laughable

[Shakrai]

I fail to see what is so evil about socialist/communist ideas. They don't work in practice but that doesn't make them evil.

Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.

Re:laughable

[hondo77]

Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.

Huh? My bosses do that every day.

Re:laughable

[h4rr4r]

WTF?
Are you 12?
All civil society will have some amount of decisions and freedom removed from the individual. We give up that freedom to have a civilization. More or less of that is not evil, it is just a choice.

Also socialism and communism are not interchangeable.

Re:laughable

[ClosedSource]

There is no "contract of employment". They pay you what they want to pay you and get rid of you at will.

The only contracts involved are the ones that say you can't work for a competitor or use the knowledge you gained on the job to get a better one.

Re:laughable

[Gadget_Guy]

Taking the fruits of your neighbors labor to supply for yourself would be called stealing if it was done directly and without the government as a middle man.

But if your neighbors are taking the fruits of their neighbors' labor to supply themselves, then the whole system becomes fair again. Sure you have to work out a system of apportioning work allotments so that one person is not being ask to provide a disproportionate of labor, but that is up to the society to figure out.

Each society might have different ideas of what constitutes work. A hippie commune might deem poetry to be a valid and valued product, whereas some other collective might only rank something that contributes materially to the society. This determination could be done democratically. Democracy and communism are not mutually exclusive.

Re:laughable

[nebaz]

The whole idea is flawed. The reason that Communism fails on a large scale is that given enough people, someone will be selfish enough to game the system for his own advantage, and refuse to play nice. To avoid this, careful group membership selection, or harsh enforcement are required.

Re:laughable

[agrif]

Taking someone else's car in exchange for little pieces of green paper would be called stealing if it wasn't backed by the government.

I agree with the grandparent, here: socialism and communism are not inherently evil ideas, any more than capitalism and federalism.

Re:laughable

[noidentity]

No, if the world were fair, each person would be held to the same standard, and the standard wouldn't make any references to specific people or groups (i.e. "friends of mine get special treatment"). Fair doesn't mean you get treated well, just that it be by the same standard as everyone else.

Re:laughable

[Shakrai]

Taking someone else's car in exchange for little pieces of green paper would be called stealing if it wasn't backed by the government.

No, because nobody put a rhetorical gun to the sellers head and told him to sell the car or go to jail.

Re:laughable

[AnotherUsername]

Presumably you drive on the roads that the government's evil socialist Department of Transportation maintains using your tax dollars. Or use water from the evil socialist city water utility. Or eat food inspected by the evil socialist FDA. Or use the evil socialist Internet developed by the government's evil socialist Department of Defense(which also maintains an evil socialist military fighting force to ensure one's freedom to spout off comments about socialism being bad).

But I guess that when socialism is only shown as welfare, it is easy to assume that socialism is stealing.

Re:laughable

[novium]

And to be pedantic, 'inalienable rights' carries certain connotations of being inherent and nontransferable. Anything that must be provided by someone else (free food, housing, healthcare) would seem to not apply. Rights, by definition, are something that exist naturally and therefore cannot be provided; they can only be surpressed. Free speech exists in a vacuum. A social net does not.

Re:laughable

[Anonymous Coward]

Ayn Rand. Everything is fair if it benefits the person judging whats fair. Everything else is totalitarian liberalism.

Re:laughable

[MikeBabcock]

I've always found it deeply ironic that many "mine mine mine!" capitalists also declare themselves to be Christians and fail to understand sharing one's wealth in the Christian sense at all.

"If you have two coats and your neighbour has none, give one of them away to him."

Give, not sell, because you have more than you need, and he has nothing. Whether you earned it or not is irrelevant.

Re:laughable

[localman]

I'm so tired of hearing this. Please, please, please: man up and point out to me a stable first-world country that is doing things as you think they should be done. Where has a lack of central regulation yielded anything other than subsistence farming and warlords? Where has a modern national infrastructure been built without government intervention? Where has the vast majority of the populous been made literate without public schools? Where has crime and poverty been kept to minimal levels without any government social programs?

As far as I know, it hasn't happened. Your ideals are based on a pipe dream just as foolish as communism: that left to their own devices the free market will get people to willingly build the cathedral of society we all take for granted today. If you have an example of this, please point it out and I'll modify my views. If you can't find an example, will you modify yours?

Re:laughable

[Cerium]

Dear Slashdot:
How do you mod an entire thread off-topic? :(

Re:laughable

[ahankinson]

Taxing and spending on "social" programs are exactly how our modern society has been built. At least in Canada, our "evil" taxes pay for the development of speculative ideas (public universities), fund a healthy workforce (public healthcare), allow unpopular and uncomfortable artistic expression (artists' grants), and provide a motivation for reporting the truth regardless of who's footing the bill (public broadcasting). Even in the states, some of your most significant developments, including building the Internet (DARPA), going to the moon (NASA) and harnessing atomic energy (Manhattan Project) have been publicly funded.

The problem with the "every person for themselves" attitude is that every person is never for themselves. Sure it starts out with everyone on a more or less equal footing. But eventually, over generations, you get a series of feedback loops. Everyone starts equal, and then a few enterprising individuals create their own wealth. This leads to them passing it on from generation to generation, giving their children more opportunities, better education and better health care. Soon you end up back where you started with an obscenely rich, but relatively small, group that controls most of the power and wealth.

The fundamental mistake most Libertarians make, in my opinion, is that they don't realize that unless there are social equalizers (like public health care, or public research) then their ideal society quickly becomes an aristocracy when in the context of normal human behaviour - that is, investing the most amount of resources into the survival of your families, instead of the society as a whole. This is a good short-term, survival-based reaction, but in a long-term stable society it is actually detrimental. The irony is that for Libertarianism to survive it requires a strong middle class, while it promotes a society where the middle class is eroded as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Re:laughable

[Aceticon]

To avoid this, careful group membership selection, or harsh enforcement are required.

At which point all those "someone [who] will be selfish enough to game the system for his own advantage" will gravitate to positions where they are the ones doing the selection and/or harsh enforcement.

Which is what happened in all so called communist countries.

More in general, communism (the utopia where everybody is equal and has the same) is a metastable state: even if a completely equal society was magically created in an instant, sooner or later, somebody smarter/sneakier would outsmart/deceive somebody which was less so and end up with more and the other with less. Said person, seeing his/her own success and the benefits of that action would do it again, while other smart/sneaky people also seeing it would copy it. Eventually the whole thing society would move to a state where some have more and some have less.

Bullshit

[dissy]

'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...

Re:More power to 'em

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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.

Re:Open Source

[gujo-odori]

Partially correct. That is one point where prior art is useful. This situation is another. If someone sues you for patent violations and you can find clear prior art, then you can attempt a flanking maneuver: file suit to have the patent invalidated. If you can invalidate the patent through prior art, you don't even have to fight the frontal battle of proving that you aren't violating the patent.

They were on an island without internet...

[webdog314]

... 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.

Re:More power to 'em

[smallfries]

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.

Re:developed these technologies over 15 years ago.

[Zordak]

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. 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. 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.

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.

15 years

[JustNiz]

>>> 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?

[FriendlyPrimate]

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?