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Texas Jury Strikes Down Man's Claim to Own the Interactive Web
ackthpt writes "Sir Tim Berners-Lee traveled to a courtroom in East Texas to give his testimony on how, if upheld, the Eolas Technologies & University of California patent on Web Interactivity could prove to be a major threat to the Internet as it's known today. The Jury deliberated only a few hours before invalidating the patent in question. In a victory Tweet Berners-Lee said, 'Texas jury agreed Eolas 906 patent invalid. Good thing too!' Google, Amazon, Apple, Adobe and a host of other companies, with representatives present, must have given a Texas-size sigh of relief."
Cue that kids from the Simpsons laughing... Point at Eolas laughing:
Ha Haa!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Satan, satan, please check your realm. Is it frozen over or what? Some East Texas jury found for the defendant in a patent law suite. Wondering what happened and how a random act of sanity struck East Texas. I know those guys were upset about their main Rick Perry being laughed off the national stage. Are they taking the first baby steps to acquire some kind of respectability?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I was originally going to submit the story yesterday with the comment "how could they consider this patentable? We had windows with full 3D manipulation going on prior to 1991. We ran Patran via X11 and to the layman that would appear as a "super" browser window. It covered all aspects of any interactive patent by having full 2-way communication, visualization, and interaction. The only thing it didn't do was run over HTTP."
But it looks like common sense ruled and the jury did the right thing for once, even in Tyler.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
A frivolous patent troll's suit is stricken down in a Texas court?
What is the world coming to??
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
maybe he thought that just showing it to world was enough to make it unpatentable.
like it should.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Sir, I've met Al Gore, and you're no Al Gore.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Since US patents have no validity outside US borders the rest of the world would have just collectively rolled its eyes yet again at daft US patents and moved on if he had have won.
Let's keep up the momentum and invalidate a host of other stupid patents.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
The crooked judge (Ward) who ran the Eastern District of Texas recently retired:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._John_Ward
Ward steered cases towards the plaintiff since his son was the major plaintiff's lawyer in town. The new judges are less crooked and do not have their children practicing before the court.
Juror 1: "If we say this patent is valid, they'll take our internet away!"
Jurors: "Hell no!"
Juror 1: "I guess we should shoot the breeze for a couple hours so they will think we thought hard about this."
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
That's very nice, but is it actually relevant to the case? I'd have thought the case would be decided on its own merits, rather that the consequences.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It seems odd that the testimony was 'could prove to be a major threat to the Internet as it's known today'. If we are going to have a patent system it seems unreasonable that the argument that the technology in the patent in question is too critical to the way society operates and is so central should be a reasonable argument for invalidating the patent claim.
I'm not intending to make any claim about this particular patent. I only wish to say that that seems like a stupid reason to invalidate a patent based on the patent framework that we seem to have.
Are the juries in East Texas biased, or do the petitioners know that most East Texans are simple, shoot-from-the-hip, straight talking, honest, hard working, family oriented men and women who aren't going to be easily bedazzled by some legalize gobbledygook that Ivy League Yankees like to throw over the heads of their working-class inferiors?
That's why WD40 has never been patented . If they applied for a patent they would have to reveal the formula.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
MS plays loads of games with patents now. No doubt they were hoping that this would be used against a number of their enemies (pretty much everybody else). So, did Eola get this wrapeed up so that if the patent was lost, that they did not have to pay back MS? Otherwise, there is a LOAD of money that has to go back to MS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Tim Berners-Lee Twitter Reference: https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/167724524299759616
Jason Wohlford
well put. the logical fallacy of "X must be true, because if it isn't the result Y would be unpalatable" should have no place in determining patent validity. It should most definitely be part of defining patent law, because you'd hope they are creating laws to produce acceptable results. But given current law, if I patent something and in the process of trying to license it everybody and their mother starts using it, a court had better determine that I get paid by those who used it without license. 'Oh, it would inconvenience too many people' is no excuse to invalidate a patent unless you're proposing to work that into the actual patent law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences
Funny you should mention that
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The effect on a patent validity decision should not be a part of the process, and based on the article's description Tim had no business there giving any opinion. Only facts about what was in place at the time, as it pertains to prior art. Also, the company only wanted money according to the article. It did not want to shut down the internet. So in this specific case, the same is true. It's irrelevant, and the 'what if' case should not be considered.
I disagree. The Constitution makes it clear that copyrights and patents are NOT a fundamental right, and exist only for consequential reasons: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Allowing Eolas to shut down the Internet, or even tax it, would not promote the progress of science and useful arts. Therefore, the courts should not allow the patent system to be used in this manner. This is true regardless of any other facts in the case. The Constitution not only permits, but demands, that we consider the 'what if' case when it comes to copyright and patent laws.
Short history lesson:
The ARPANET (1970-1990) and the start of the NSFNET (1985-1995) and the attachment of CERN to NSFNET (1989) and the writing of the first WorldWideWeb browser (1990) predated Gore's involvement (HPC&Com act of 1991). The stuff that Gore's bill funded essentially funded optical links (the information superhighway) to update/expand the NSFNET and provided funds for the NCSA @UI which made the Mosaic web browser (1992)
However, the commercial internet (the network) that we know of really came out of CIX which was an attempt by various US commercial network providers to avoid the acceptable use policy of the NSFnet backbone. Originally, the government allowed some such "non-acceptable" traffic through a third party company (called ANS), but they charged too much so CIX was formed by UUNET, PCINET, and CERFNET to bypass the NSFnet backbone all together. The concept of "peering" traffic was also rolled out at that time.
One might argue that the bill written by Gore providing the "taste" of an internet was done to spur corporations to develop the CIX backbone themselves, but having lived through those intitial times pre-CIX, I can say that it was more like how the existance of the Post Office spurred the creation of FedEx than any direct monetary benefit from the funding that the NSFnet backbone folks got... You might argue that the research that made FedEx (commercial internet) was possible was "funded" by the PostOffice (ANS/NSFnet), but that's a tenuous argument at best.
Please site your sources.
In case you want some more though, the facts simply don't line up with your snark. The percentage of patent cases where the plaintiff succeeded at trial was, over the period from 1995-2009, in line with the national average (66.7% trial success in East Texas vs. 66% nationwide), and by all indications it hasn't changed from that in the last few years (as a point of comparison, Florida Middle District Court had an 80% trial success rate for plaintiffs over that same period).
According to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._John_Ward
Since Ward initially joined the Eastern District of Texas, the district has seen a tenfold increase in cases since 1999.[8] There were 14 patent cases in 1999,[8] 32 in 2002,[1] 155 in 2005,[8] and 234 in 2006.[1] The district is one of eight with more than 100 new patent filings each year.[8] Ward heard more than 160 patent cases in his first seven years on the bench.[3] He had been handling 90% of the patent cases in Marshall, but later was reduced to 60%.[6]
Patent cases presented before Ward were more frequently won by the patent holder plaintiff than the defense.[9] One source claims that patent holders win 88% of the time in Ward's court, compared to an average of 68% nationwide.[3] Another source claims that patent cases in Marshall are won by patent holders 78% of the time versus 59% nationwide.[1] And a third source claims that in 90% of cases patent holders win jury verdicts.[8]