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Invalidation of Eolas's Web Patent Claims Upheld
New submitter Ajay Anand writes with news that Eolas's web patents are really dead (the infamous browser plugin patent that forced Internet Explorer to change how it activated plugins). After Eolas sued a number of companies, last fall a jury found the patents invalid; Eolas naturally mounted an appeal. But a panel of judges simply affirmed the jury decision (PDF). A quiet ending to a decade of patent trolling.
Actually, the University of California is *owed* money. It does not owe money. The University of California is the original patentee.
The patent was the poster child for "obvious patent". The reason they were so successful in court was that everyone who created a web browser added similar functionality. The standard response to this is "of course it's obvious in hindsight", but the court case shows that someone implemented the idea before Eolas, putting the nail in the coffin of that train of thought.
I remember the time too. And I know that embedding objects into documents was all the rage in 1993. And even from systems to systems. CORBA's first spec was published in 1991. OLE and COM were combined into DCOM about the same time. I had university lessons in the CORBA and the DCOM object model at the time. So I would call Eolas' patents obvious in 1993.