IP-WARS.NET || Eolas Patent Ruling Reversed

Eolas Patent Ruling Reversed

By JCausey, Section IP Articles
Posted on Thu Mar 3rd, 2005 at 17:40:50 EST

My apologies for the brevity of this article. I felt this news probably deserves a little more than a mention in the Breaking News article of the site.

I ran across news from ComputerWorld this morning that Eolas's $520 million win over Microsoft regarding one of their patents they claim was infringed by Internet Explorer was overturned by an appeals court. The patent in question is US#5,838,906 (aka the 906 patent)that dealt with embedded objects in web pages. [As an aside - if you were especially gifted in school at being able to write long papers without actually saying anything, you should look into a career writing patents, at least software/business method patents.]

When the case was going on, the W3C came out on Microsoft's side in the case and urged the USPTO to reexamine the validity of the patent. And last year, the USPTO did in fact reject the patent. Eolas and the University of California (a co-owner of the patent) indicated they were going to appeal the USPTO's ruling, but I've yet to find any news on the result of that.

Finally, Eolas must have felt emboldened with their initial win over Microsoft. I discovered that they were just granted a new patent, US#6,857,124 that covers

Method and system for hypermedia browser API simulation to enable use of browser plug-ins and applets as embedded widgets in script-language-based interactive programs

They reference the 906 patent in the application. I'm sure someone with more technical knowledge than me (which is a large population) can correct me, but it very much looks to me like this new patent is pretty much the same as the 906 patent with some fancier language and perhaps a few minor changes to cover new ways that folks have figured out how to do what was covered in the 906 patent.

Thanks for reading!

Jeff

< SOFTMAN PRODUCTS v. ADOBE SYSTEMS (20 comments) | SCO To Restate Earnings (18 comments) >

Eolas Patent Ruling Reversed | 18 comments (18 topical, 0 editorial, 5 hidden)

Bittersweet (3.85 / 7) (#1)
by mikey (mikey at badpenguins dot com) on Thu Mar 3rd, 2005 at 18:27:47 EST
(User Info) http://www.ip-wars.net

What a bittersweet ruling. On one hand it was lovely to see Microsoft get shafted to the tune of 500M. On the other hand this suit was a perfect example of a patent system gone mad. Perhaps some day ALL software players can get together and decide software patents suck, and actually do something to get them abolished.

---
DISCLAIMER:
IANAL, may have no idea what the heck I am talking about, yadda yadda yadda.

Re: Bittersweet by nathanh, 03/03/2005 22:27:03 EST (3.83 / 6)

Re: Bittersweet by mikey, 03/04/2005 00:19:18 EST (4.40 / 5)

Re: Bittersweet by codswallet, 03/04/2005 00:56:26 EST (4.25 / 4)

Re: Bittersweet by codswallet, 03/03/2005 22:40:06 EST (4.00 / 6)

Re: Bittersweet by nathanh, 03/03/2005 23:22:26 EST (3.80 / 5)

Re: Bittersweet by codswallet, 03/03/2005 23:43:41 EST (3.80 / 5)

Re: Bittersweet by daveventura, 03/04/2005 00:07:18 EST (3.16 / 6)

Re: Bittersweet by codswallet, 03/04/2005 00:16:06 EST (3.60 / 5)

US Legal System Could Be Worse (3.57 / 7) (#10)
by daveventura on Tue Mar 8th, 2005 at 14:23:24 EST
(User Info)

Read this article about Italy's legal system:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=583&ncid=583&e=1&u=/nm/20050308/od_n m/odd_italy_court_dc
People who find Kimbell and Wells slow consider this:
"Italian justice is notoriously slow and it takes on average 3,041 days to obtain a definitive sentence in a civil case."

Bye bye spambot (none / 1) (#14)
by Potential Recruit on Mon Nov 27th, 2006 at 10:06:32 EST

This used to be a spambot post that is flooding the site. Due to volume, I had to resort to this while I work to block access by these bots. My apologies - thanks for your patience.

Jeff

Bye bye spambot (none / 0) (#17)
by Potential Recruit on Tue Nov 28th, 2006 at 11:48:25 EST

This used to be a spambot post that is flooding the site. Due to volume, I had to resort to this while I work to block access by these bots. My apologies - thanks for your patience.

Jeff

Bye bye spambot (none / 0) (#18)
by Potential Recruit on Tue Nov 28th, 2006 at 12:16:30 EST

This used to be a spambot post that is flooding the site. Due to volume, I had to resort to this while I work to block access by these bots. My apologies - thanks for your patience.

Jeff

Eolas Patent Ruling Reversed | 18 comments (18 topical, 0 editorial, 5 hidden)

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