RSSEolas Settles Microsoft Dispute, Was Likely Paid Cash
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published August 30, 2007, 4:21 PM
As first reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Todd Bishop, the retrial of the long-running Eolas v. Microsoft case has come to an abrupt end. Eolas shareholders were notified on Monday, Bishop learned, to expect a very special dividend of between $60 and $72 per share.
Since Eolas is not a public company, it isn't possible to do the math to see how much that represents, but that still sounds like a very significant sum. It's indicative of a payout by Microsoft, though probably less than the $565 million it would have had to pay had an appeals court not overturned a judgment against it in March 2005.
Eolas represents the interests of developers from the University of California who hold patents on the concept of Web pages that trigger the execution of binary code. The organization filed suit against Microsoft in 1999, and appeared likely to emerge victorious until two years ago, when the existence of very similar sounding Microsoft patents emerged.
Last May, after the Supreme Court made landmark rulings that changed the concept of patentability of code, Microsoft won a motion allowing it to argue the invalidity of Eolas' patents, even though the USPTO declared those patents valid prior to the high court rulings. That event may have pushed Eolas to finally find a way to wrap this up.
It doesn't appear Eolas shareholders will be too disappointed about it having prohibited itself from discussing the terms of its settlement. In its shareholders' letter, company COO Mark Swords wrote, "We believe that the end of the litigation with Microsoft is the beginning of an exciting new stage in the growth and development of Eolas."
The question that no one seems to have asked yet is, now that they've reached an agreement, will we see the end of "Click to activate and use this control" in IE?
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Will Eolas now go after the other browser makers, e.g. Apple, Mozilla, and Opera? After all, Microsoft was not doing something unique: it was simply implementing certain elements of the HTML standards; and all browsers which are standards-compliant must implement these same elements, and must therefore be equally liable.
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Nope. They've all fixed it now.
Actually, maybe Firefox hasn't.
Opera definitely have.
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They've "fixed it"? How? I know that Mozilla and Opera have not dropped the HTML features in question -- they couldn't and still claim to be standards-compliant -- and I know that they have not adopted the workaround that Microsoft chose.
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Opera has indeed adopted the workaround Microsoft chose. You now have to click Flash animations for them to operate.
I'm not sure that Mozilla have though...
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Nope, not here, running latest firefox with latest flash, no clicking needed. I think really, it would be a joke if they did change, someone would make a workaround extension so fast, it would be pointless (or at least i hope, that it would be feasible)
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Right you are. But Eolas could still go after Opera for Opera's infringement of their patent prior to Opera 9.
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Are you sure? If someone says you're infringing on their patents and you remove the offending code or do a workaround then that's compliance with the alleged patent breach surely?
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This is a legal issue, and I am no lawyer, but AFAIK Eolas could sue for damages for past use of its "invention". But Eolas could no longer go after Opera for royalties.
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I hate Eolas.
Money grabbing SOBs are all that they are.
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It is a complete joke and yet another example of why software patents should be abolished.
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Eola$
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