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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.
... otherwise we could have had a chance of removing this godawful AJAX UI for good.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
'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...
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.
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. ;)
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.
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?
... 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.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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.
>>> 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.
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.
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?