RSSSupreme Court: No to IE Patent Case
By Nate Mook | Published October 31, 2005, 12:36 PM
The United States Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by Microsoft regarding its patent lawsuit brought by Eolas and the University of California over the way Internet Explorer utilizes browser plug-ins.
The decision is the second legal setback for Microsoft in as many months. In late September, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office upheld Eolas' patent, which Microsoft claimed should be invalidated by prior art. Microsoft said it would turn to the courts to have the patent nullified.
A federal court previously awarded Eolas $521 million for damages relating to Microsoft's use of its intellectual property. Microsoft was attempting to challenge the methodology behind that amount, which has ballooned to $560 due to interest, in front of the Supreme Court.
Microsoft says the damages were calculated using worldwide sales of Windows, rather than just those copies sold in the United States where Eolas' patent is enforced. 64 percent of the award covered overseas sales, Microsoft said in its filing.
The Redmond company is attempting to appeal the patent verdict on another front as well.
In June 2004, Microsoft filed a 174-page brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn the ruling. In March, the appeal was granted, sending the case back to a lower court, where Microsoft plans to prove that Eolas did not invent the technology, and knowingly withheld information from the USPTO.
Some of the software affected by the patent would include Macromedia Flash, QuickTime, RealOne Player, Acrobat Reader, Sun's Java Virtual Machine, and Windows Media Player among other applications that embed into Web pages.
"Some of the software affected by the patent would include Macromedia Flash, QuickTime, RealOne Player, Acrobat Reader, Sun's Java Virtual Machine, and Windows Media Player among other applications that embed into Web pages."
If IE's ability to show these files in it's pages is removed, I can see problems with Sub, Adobe, Real Networks, Apple and Macromedia.
I personally think that flash, Realplayer, quick time and Acrobat are total crap. But people use them for various things anyway.
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|If you did some reasearch you'd know that the patent is about use of the tag, I'm not sure if it includes the xhtml valid tag, but I doubt it, and besides - there's plenty of ways of using flash in html without touching the OBJECT tag. It's a bs patent, even the w3c have said so, but I can see the point he's making even if he hasn't said so publicaly - he's playing Microsoft at their own game, good luck to him, wish I had done it :)
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|How do you not use Flash? A majority of web developers have toned down on the flash heavy apps in favor of AJAX or other methods, but flash is still very popular, mostly for headers and menus... Quicktime is in my opinion the best choice for any video, its much more crisp then WMP, I dunno I watch alot of tutorials, and theater previews online, RealOne is a must because people still choose to use it...If you don't use PDF files you obviously are just a casuall user of the computer and are not in any pro field, or IT. I will agree with you on the Java plugin I hate sites that still try and use some kind of applet, Java is great but they lost the web battle long ago to Macromedia...
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|Personally Quicktime, and realplayer are both crap. They you more then double the resources that WMP10 uses. Both Quicktime and realplayer both force themselfs into the startup. Besides that I create WMV files that have better quility and are 1.2 the size of most .mov files.
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|"Both Quicktime and realplayer both force themselfs into the startup."
Not a big thing to fix.
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|mplayer for windows kicks butt, otherwise Windows Media Player isn't so bad.
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|True not hard to fix.
Except for the fact that everytime you run these programs they add themselfs back there again. You don't see this with WMP doing this, now do you.
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|I've removed real and quicktime from startup. Quicktime has never re-added itself, and the only thing I see of real is realsched.exe that takes up a mere 148k of ram. As I said not that big of a deal.
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|What version of real are you using, I am not using the latest one(no reason to use it). As for Quicktime I have the latest version. I just checked now(removed quicktime from startup using regedit, rebooted machine, then open and .mov file I then opened MSconfig and there is quicktime again in the startup). The best way to stop this I find is to uninstall both of them. iTunes does the same thing, I just downloaded it and tried it out.
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|I've got real 10 and the latest version of quicktime. I do notice I have an Itunehelper running. Gonna see what I can do about that.
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|You have to uncheck the boxes in preferences to remove it from the systray and disable instant on first.
My complaint is itunes running ipod-helper. I don't have one, and I really don't want to run that service. (It's disabled in services, yet still runs when I start itunes)
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|All I can say is Microsoft has to learn that it can't trample over everyone and expect no backlash from it.
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|That's a rather MS bashing comment, with no thought what so ever behind it.
Plugin's had been done before, as MS are right on this one. Sure they've squished many other small outfits with heavy handed tactics, but Eolas is just making a quick buck here outta the dumb way software IP is handled.
Do Eolas even have a product that uses this patent? Or is a patent for the hell of a patent?
It's like Forgent Networks sueing every one over the JPEG patent... years after it's become a worldwide defacto standard. RAMBUS also comes to mind with thier IP in regards to the DDR RAM debarcal.
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|Eolas did not invent any kind of plugin technology for web browsers. They simply took the existing technology and happened to be the first to file a patent for it.
Now they are just being a nuisance trying to get rich quick.
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|Not MS bashing, while this one itself may not hold much wait, you yourself have said that it's true that MS on many occasions has been rather underhanded. True this was used well before these guys got a patent on it, so yes they are just trying to make a quick buck, but I would imagine that MS has done this before too, so all I can say is what goes around comes around.
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|Who the heck uses these plugins anyway?
Macromedia Flash, QuickTime, RealOne Player, Acrobat Reader, Sun's Java Virtual Machine, and Windows Media Player
Surely this patent won't fly.
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|Who uses them? They come on most PC's by default, and me--yes, even me, who UTTERLY DESPISES almost all use of browser plugins, uses the Macromedia flash plugin for IE.
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