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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.'"
I agree and to a greater extent this is why I feel that IP (especially regarding computer programs) is laughable in general. Literally anything is possible when talking about virtual environments and manipulation of data. This reminds me of the recent patent that MS was awarded for what basically amounts to XML. Now they were awarded the patent, but they didn't invent anything. I look at it like I look at legos. Every programming language has a set of legos. Just because you used certain pieces of a premade set to do something doesn't mean you "own" that configuration. It's like saying I copyrighted the C chord and if you play a C an E and a G anywhere you owe me. Look back at history and realize that Elisha Gray got SCREWED because of a piece of arbitrary paperwork.
Seriously- software patenting is a rich boys club; or another manifestation of the motto "the one with the most money wins". There are thousands of patents like this; scads of unoriginal montages of half-baked and recycled ideas, cleverly disguised and slopped up to the USPO, and approved, cha ching. It takes this kind of outrage and political pressure to get one patent reviewed. What chance does the small software company have protecting itself against patents with a lineage of prior art? It's also a positive feedback system; patents breed patents, just look at the crazy exponential explosion of USPO patents over the last five years. And sitting in the middle of the web is the black widow, the USPO, raking in the fees while spending precious little fix the spiraling problem. Once practical answer: maybe register your software company in the Cayman Islands or Vanuatu, or some other such place and take your international profits offshore. Better defensive legal system; and better protection against the system fueled by common-revenue-oriented legislation and wayward lawyers.
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.
Try living in Canada. Canada ruled a long time ago that software patents are not allowed. However due to the patent treaty we signed with the US and half of Europe, now they are.
:(
If you are confused, this means that Canadians are not allowed to be awarded software patents (good), but still need to abide by software patents awarded to Americans and Europeans or be SUED (very bad).
If you are STILL confused, welcome to the club
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?
You realize almost every new concept exists as technology showcases before they make there appearance in the general public right?
Ok, I can understand why you didn't read the article, and why you didn't read the summary, but how did you manage to read the end of my post and not see the beginning?
I'll requote for you adding the important bits:
'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.
Please insert $0.25 to play again!
Well capitalism doesn't work in practice either. If your definition of "in practice" is complete and total adherence to a particular ideology. If you mean are their modified versions of ideological capitalism, socialism, and communism working in the world, I'd have to say yes. And all are working quite well. The top ten economies actually only include one capitalist state. So if anything it's capitalism that doesn't work.
How about the first guy sells his food for money to the second guy, then uses that placeholder of equal value to purchase whatever it is he needs from guy three.
In essence, from guy one according to his ability, to guy two according to his need, then from guy three according to their ability and back to guy one according to his need.
My god! Capitalism is Communism!
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
At this point scrolling down, does anyone remember what the original article was about? I don't think it was about establishing a libertarian communist dictatorship exploited by fruit-growing neighbors...
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.
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.
$50 for $200 is not extreme at all. Even after $100 of overhead at the client's firm, you still extract 1/6 of the value. That's much more than most Wall St traders.
People forget that capitalism is basically the people with capital (i.e. money) extracting all the profits because capital is scarce compared to labor. This hasn't been true for the last 30 years: capital is so damn cheap now that you can build a FedEx or a Google or a Microsoft fresh out of college. Now it's all about "intellectual capital" (i.e. people thinking) - the whole rise of the middle class was due to people needing enough strength and education to run machines, now you need the brains and education to use a computer to do stuff (a junior lawyer recently told me she bills $300+/hr to basically do Google searches.)
Sadly, this dooms 95% of the population to slowly leave the "middle class."
Someone should call estoppel on patent trolls. Not enforcing a patent when they could, in full knowledge that it is being used, is deceptive, as it is good grounds for others to assume they don't have the patent. Therefore to enforce the patent now would be in bad faith, yada yada. I am not a lawyer, nor do I know any lawyers, or anyone who knows a lawyer, but I do know some big words. So there is a good chance this won't work.
In socialism you have a guarantee of a certain level of blessing.
Yeah, like the privilege to wait in line for twelve hours to buy toilet paper.
In pure capitalism you have NO guarantee of blessings. But you have a chance of becoming a brazzilionaire.
It has nothing to do with being a 'brazzilionaire'. My combined tax burden across state/federal/local/property/sales/etc is close to 50%. I make a whooping $30,000. I just want to keep some more of that money. What's wrong with that desire?
The fear of socialism in the states confuses me, it isn't complicated and it is already partially implemented.
It's a fear of losing freedom and having individuality subordinated by the state.
It all comes down to this. Do you think everyone deserves service-x?
No, I don't think anybody deserves any service they aren't willing or able to pay for. I'll await my troll mod now for having the audacity to say that out loud.
Setting the cost of a bus ride to a dollar or even 50c seems like a no brainer.
It seems like nothing of the sort to me. If bus service is so cheap then why can't those who rely upon it pay the full cost of receiving it? Why should I have to subsidize it?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Heck, why stop there.
It means you don't get food or water to live while a rich person somewhere is throwing food away.
It means you don't have a right to keep your property or your family if someone else is powerful enough to take them away from you.
Which means by hobbe's leviathan, you and your 19 best poor buddies rise up every time it gets unfair enough and cut people's heads off, beat them to death in mobs, and other behavior. Because the asshats didn't have enough sense to keep things even remotely fair. So you are morally justified in doing any damn thing you please.
So?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
And I say that is irrational that people should die just because they are incapable. Take myself for instance. I have had two open heart surgeries (2,7) and and a spine surgery(11). The first heart surgery was when I was two. I was unfortunately intelligent enough at a young enough age (without proper guidance) to wrestle with the idea of should I have been allowed to even exist. Being that I was worth 2 million before my third birthday and my parents couldn't afford the costs, (at least that was what I was told.) I wondered why I was so special.
But now that I am more mature, I can say without a doubt every human life is valuable. Every one. If we help each other to see it, the benefits start to become exponential. Imagine, if "I" or someone else is incapable at any moment, but later on design or invent something that changes the world, it could pay off a multitudes "societal debt".
Lets say that they are old and incapable, do we give disincentive to get old and turn people toward living the fast life? Lets also not forget, our elders have wisdom. Those that forget the past, are often doomed to repeat it.
In the end, we all will meet hardship at one point or another. Even if you aren't religious, can you deny that pulling together through the thin times is what enable us to conquer the Earth and all obstacles that we have so far? Without that basic "good will" of a critical mass, well, we'd be lucky to have much more than than oxcarts I would venture to say. Good will allows civilization (if but indirectly) and prevents chaos and calls down order.
Not but a few hundred years ago the club and sword were all that truly mattered for conquering, now we are conquering medicine and science on orders of magnitude of magnitude.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
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 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.
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.
It is fundamentally contradictory to be both an evolutionist AND a libertarian.
Darwin's most cited source, the research on which he built his own research was the theory of Maltus. . Maltus showed that the human population grows exponentially, while resources like food grow linearly. Darwin expanded this to all species, and stated this as the source of scarcity, which creates competition - without which, evolution cannot happen.
But Maltus implies that poverty is almost NEVER the result of "laziness", "providence" or the influence of a deity. Poverty happens because human population grows faster than our food supply (and other resources). This can change now - we have technology that didn't exist in Maltus' time, birth control. However it's an easily checkable fact that family planning only happens above a certain education threshold even now.
So free education is a form of enlightened self-interest. More educated people means less people struggling for resources that will never be enough.
In the meantime though - the simple fact is, poor people are poor because the maths don't work, and the vast majority of them can never be anything else. We HAVE to take care of each other, and accept that the poverty around us deserves pity, as most of the people suffering it, truly have no other option.
That is the core result of Maltus' theory - and if you reject Maltus, you cannot hold Darwin as the one is an extension of the other.
The claim that "any government powerful enough to give you what you want, is powerful enough to take everything away" begs the question (in the proper sense of the phrase). It assumes that the state, and legislature and power-holding government must always be the same entity. Why ? Those branches of government that provide services should be maximally enlarged. Those that wield power, kept as small as possible.
And you worry about having to pay some taxes ? In Brazil, tax rate is a flat 20%. And you get 100% of it back at the end of the year. The government takes the money, invests it, and spends next years budget out of the earnings - you get all your taxes back, the only loss is a bit of earnings and inflation. Since there is no way you alone could have earned on your taxes, what can be earned by the combined taxes of everyone - this is the most efficient allocation of the resource.
With that, the government can afford, among other things, to provide free medical care to all. And I've been in their hospitals, the state medical in Brazil is of HIGHER quality than the private medical care in South Africa. Preventative care like oxygen tank time for people with a viral infection is standard practice, not something that only happens if you're rich enough to pay for it (and your insurance company doesn't weasel out of their obligations).
All this, for effectively, ZERO tax. Sure, it's 20% monthly, but it's zero yearly.
Maltus doesn't mean it's impossible to relieve poverty, it means we cannot blame it on the poor - if poverty is caused by lack of resources, then the answer is to allocate resources more efficiently, which opens up the door to a loophole in Maltus' theory. It assumes the terminal stupidity of our species. Getting more people educated, can reduce stupidity (specifically in family planning) and change the maths.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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
Europe doesn't have software patents..... yet.
The problem is that legal tourism means that its about the lowest point, so the US/UK extradition treaty is based on the US idea of "fuck, he must be guilty" while libel tourism goes to the UK as there is a nutty judge (Eady) who appears to think that even if you are a corrupt funder of terrorist groups then it would be wrong to actually say that out loud.
Software patents, such as the Eolas one fail miserably on the "non-obvious" basis. My favourite prior art on this would be the wonder that is Emacs, Emacs is an environment with a million different plug-ins which delegate IO to the containing applications, these elements can be downloaded dynamically if you want as well. Hypercard would he a hypermedia prior art.
The US standard for patents is so low that basically anything is patentable and the "non-obvious" clause appears to have been dropped, even prior art has arguably been dropped and a reasonable time perspective of this being about 15 years they've had the patent and in that time they've sued one company.
And which company did they sue? Was it the same company who gave money to SCO to "settle" things.
Go figure.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
In the same vein:
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.
On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
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.