RSSMicrosoft Allowed to Argue Invalidity of Eolas Patent
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 31, 2007, 1:30 PM
Bloomberg News broke the news yesterday that Microsoft will be allowed to argue that patents held by research firm Eolas Technologies regarding the ability to embed functionality in a Web browser page are invalid, when a retrial of Eolas' long-running patent suit begins on July 9.
This ruling was passed down by the US Patent and Trademark Office, even though the Eolas patent's validity was upheld in September 2005, following Microsoft having won its appeal of the original decision earlier in March. The original decision found Microsoft's ActiveX technologies in Internet Explorer to have infringed upon Eolas' conceptual patent.
But a June 2004 legal brief from Microsoft explaining why something as obvious as embedding functionality into a Web browser wasn't deserving of patent protection, has (very) slowly gained momentum, and may have been the catalyst for Microsoft's having won its original appeal.
Now, in the face of recent patent law decisions by the US Supreme Court declaring very abstract concepts including source code non-patentable, that 2004 argument may gain a new head of steam.
Microsoft holds its own patents to similarly-themed technologies, one of which was reportedly reissued by the USPTO just last week. The company may be borrowing some leverage from the fact that the Patent Office would actually do such a thing, to bolster its arguments that Microsoft cannot be infringing upon something the USPTO itself claims is being protected on Microsoft's behalf.
On the other hand, if Microsoft continues to challenge the patentability of embedded functionality when it makes its refreshed case before a new US District Court judge in July, it may find itself once again in an historically ironic position, as it could be simultaneously arguing against last week's USPTO grant to Microsoft.
a "conceptual" patent? That sounds very suspect to me. You can't patent an "idea or suggestion" (http://www.uspto.gov/web...eral/index.html#whatpat) so I would assume they had some sort of tangible example described or demonstrated in the patent art when they filed.
Score: 0
|a la verga con estos hijos de puta
Score: 0
|Do they have idiots working in the Law Offices at Microsoft? A couple of weeks ago they were declaring that Open Source was infringing on a couple of hundred of their patents. Now they are resurrecting the argument that "something as obvious as embedding functionality into a Web browser wasn't deserving of patent protection"?
Score: 0
|The Eolas patent needs to be thrown out.
Microsoft Word had the ability to have embedded objects, such as Excel spreadsheets, years before the Eolas patent was filed. They took this same technology (OLE) and applied it to web pages, allowing it to host the same embedded objects.
Given that there was prior art for embedding objects in a Word document, how can Eolas feel that applying the same concept to HTML documents instead, is novel and unobvious?
Score: 0
|This patent should be burned at the stake as an example of what is wrong with tech patents.
Score: 0
|Michael David Doyle needs to be burned at the stake as well.
Score: 0
|On this occasion Microsoft are entirely right. To patent the concept of embedding functionality into a web browser page is vague to say the least.
Does this include Flash and other types of embedding? How about the embedded feature of being able to view html pages?
How far does it go?
Score: 0
|"Does this include Flash and other types of embedding? How about the embedded feature of being able to view html pages?"
Yes. That is why after the initial ruling flash had to be user activated instead of embedded directly into the page. I am sure many of you have seen flash in IE with the border around it that says "click to play" or in FF there is the play button instead of the flash. This is because of the ruling.
There is however a way that web developers have sort of gotten around this obstical. If you use javascript to embed the flash object you circumvent the IE border/FF play button and arguably are not infringing on the patent.
I hope that this patent gets thrown out.
Score: 0
|The "click to activate" message is a security feature!
Score: 0
|i can't tell whether you're joking or serious.
he's not talking about the ribbon that slides down from the top of the screen but the tooltip that comes up when you mouseover a flash object that doesn't use the hack.
Score: 0
|