Microsoft Nailed by Software Patent 668
An anonymous reader writes "It was just announced that Microsoft lost the case where it was accused of violating Eolas' patent on embedded applications in the Internet Explorer browser. They have been fined $521 million in damages."
Re:Peanuts (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, half a billion isn't a "drop in the bucket" even for M$. M$ has quarterly revenues of roughly US$12 Billion.
That's 4 percent of their quarterly revenue which is not an insignificant number for the corporate accounting types.
But then again, M$ does have ~US$48 Billion in cash reserves. So I guess it is just a drop.
Re:Whoa... (Score:3, Informative)
Extra links (Score:4, Informative)
EOLAS SUES MICROSOFT FOR INFRINGEMENT OF PATENT... [eolas.com]
The patent [164.195.100.11]
Link to patent (Score:5, Informative)
Link to the actual patent [uspto.gov].
I'm not much at reading patents but this looks like the usual silly IT patent that could apply to just about anything. Can't see this as a good thing at all.
Re:Hard to know what to feel. (Score:2, Informative)
Second that! I listened to RMS in india (the recording, not me...but that would have been cool), and The Man is brilliant. It is also funny, especially the idiots that doesn't get it...lol, anyhow, here [sslug.dk] is a link I found with the speech in ogg.
Improvement in tech-patent news (Score:3, Informative)
I follow the patent stories here all the time, and I'm used to trying to take the scattered details of whatever news service we're linking to to find the actual patents. Just wanted to point out that it's refreshing to find a major information source using actual patent nos.
Re:A Half Billion: (Score:5, Informative)
Although this news is great, there is still quite a fight ahead. An appellate judge will decide in the upcoming weeks if the appeal has merrit. If so, it could drag on for years. In that case, Microsoft will likely settle for much less. The one thing I noticed about the trial that might give MS grounds for appeal is the trial judge instructed the jury not to weigh testimony from Pei Wei, a fellow who claims to have prior art. If the judge handled that innapropriately, MS could have grounds for appeal.
It could go either way for MS, though and they may get spanked harder than you think. This is only one of several cases. Eolas is also filing separate suits against MS for Windows sales between 2001 and present day and sales before the scope of the current trial. Also, other makers of browsers and plug-ins may find themselves involved in litigation with Eolas very soon!
Isn't Free Software Vunerale as Well? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, from the article:
Isn't that irrelevant, and why software patents are 'evil'? It doesn't matter whether your work was completely independent. If it is patented, your stuffed.
Having said that though, check out the case Frearson v Loe, dated 1878 (google is your friend). I gather (in my naive IANAL way) that it is an often quoted precedent. The case determined that non-commercial experimentation is okay, even in the face of patents. Can writing free software be considered to be an experiment?
Re:It's amazing.. (Score:5, Informative)
You can see some of the things thay have patented here [eolas.com].
I seem to recall a article [pbs.org] where the founder of Eolas was talking about a patent war against Microsoft, not because they wanted royalties but because they objected to the I.E.ization of the web.
Notice that Eolas is going after Microsoft, not Sun or Mozilla.
Standard practice for patent profolio companies is to prey on the weaker first. Eolas went after the main standard breaker with their lawsuit. I think this should give us some hope about Eolas's intentions.
This not good ... it was a BS patent to begin with (Score:1, Informative)
That said. It should never have won in court.
Too broad and the company never used it to gain profit on it's own merits.
Re:It's amazing.. (Score:2, Informative)
They haven't gone after Sun or Mozilla.....yet. You can bet they will.
No, but Viola probably is. (Score:5, Informative)
My objection to most software patents stands. If you're doing something that an expert would consider to be an obvious extension to the current state of the art, you don't have something patentable.
Re:So (Score:2, Informative)
How about 100 times as much [msnbc.com]? Microsoft has near 50 billion of good ole cash in the bank.
Re:So Eolas invented COM and ActiveX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So Eolas invented COM and ActiveX (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"Jury of their peers" is dead (Score:3, Informative)
Here's some prior art. (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft's own Object Linking and Embedding technology (OLE). It was at version 2.0 in mid 1993 [google.com] on Windows 3.
I think this blows the doors off the patent. I still have my old Windows 3.1 disks and Microsoft Word 6 somewhere (if they've not decayed). This could handily do all of the "embedding" parts mentioned in the patent. Specific examples include embedding an Excel spreadsheet, a drawing or an equation - each created and displayed by the user interacting with an external program embedded into the document.
And if a "Word document" doesn't meet the definition of a hypertext document, I'm sure Powerpoint presentations do.
The only caveat is the "remotely distributed" bit, although I suppose a LAN could be considered a "remotely distributed" environment if the document resided on a central server.
In conclusion: software patents are evil. Without exception. Even the cases like this can set very nasty precidents.
Re:So Eolas invented COM and ActiveX (Score:1, Informative)
In 1994, Com was for a single computer. MS filed their Dcom patent in 1996.
Re:Microsoft should wiggle out of this one... (Score:3, Informative)
how rediculous.
It's not just the 521 million (Score:1, Informative)
tkwww, prior art, and my dance with Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
During the litigation, lawyers from Microsoft contacted me about a program that I wrote in 1992 called tkwww which was an early web browser. The important thing about tkwww was that it rendered images by calling an external application xli.
This was sufficiently close to what microsoft was looking for that a lawyer (who was named Vlad of all things) talked to me about what I did. I stupidly gave him a pointer to a URL through which they downloaded everything, and even more stupidly did not bill them anything at the time.
When I finally came around to sending them an invoice I got some stupid excuse about them might needing me as a witness so that they couldn't pay me anything. I never heard from them again.
The reason I didn't mention this earlier was because I thought that the Eolas patent was silly and I didn't want to say anything that would help them. Now that they won the case against Microsoft, I'd like to let everyone know about this prior art, in case Eolas decided to go against other people.
Re:It's amazing.. (Score:5, Informative)
The truly important question is whether or not the company actually produces anything. If they do, then they're vulnerable to a countersuit involving patent infringement.
"IP" holding companies are some of the most dangerous creatures in the technological world today. The reason is simple: the traditional way the patent game is played is that most companies would collect patents for use as a defense against patent infringement suits. When the inevitable suit happened, they'd break out their own patent portfolio and, hopefully, find at least one that the company suing them was infringing. Both companies would agree to cross-license their patents and life is good again.
Companies that don't have a patent portfolio are at a disadvantage in that game, of course, but the upside is that patent infringement suits were relatively rare, so one could do development work in relative peace. Only if you were wildly successful as a result would you face an infringement suit, and at that point you'd generally have the ability to pay for a licensing arrangement -- unless the initiator of the suit was a competitor (as was the case in, e.g., Amazon vs. B&N). The overall system wasn't perfect, of course, but it worked well enough. Certainly free software was reasonably safe from such suits because there would be no money to be had from such a suit.
Enter the "IP" holding company. The problem with such a company is that there is no defense against them. The traditional method of cross-licensing doesn't work because such a company doesn't infringe on any patents. It can't, because the company itself doesn't actually make anything. As often (probably more, actually) as not, these "IP" holding companies don't even invent anything. Their sole purpose in life is to suck money out of companies that do invent and build things. That can include any company that does a lot of free software work, like IBM and RedHat.
I think these "IP" companies are among the greatest dangers our technology-driven world faces today, because there is no effective remedy against them, short of legislation. And we all know how likely it is that that will be of overall benefit.
Re:Peanuts (Score:2, Informative)
But the judge was deamed unclean to rule due to comments he made on the record during the trial, that came out aftwards.
Re:It's amazing.. (Score:1, Informative)
You misquoted the parent. He said "He means fuck them up the ass."
the patent text (Score:3, Informative)
The actual patent text is at uspto.gov [uspto.gov].
It seems that IE is not the only browser that would be susceptible to a lawsuit.
From the abstract: ...(allowing a browser) to access and execute an embedded program object
Re:Laches (Score:4, Informative)
that the patent holder's delay was unreasonable and inexcusable (there is a presumption that 6 years is a sufficient delay for this purpose); and
The alleged infringer suffered materially prejudicial harm from the delay. For example, if the delay has meant that the claimed damages are significantly increased, then the doctrine of laches may prevent the plaintiff recovering that increase.
Re:It's amazing.. (Score:5, Informative)
Bzzt, wrong. It's trademarks you lose if you don't enforce them. Patents can be enforced as selectively as you care, likewise with copyright.
Re:So Eolas invented COM and ActiveX (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.makeashorterlink.com
Thanx,
Nalfy
Re:the patent text (Score:3, Informative)
Remember that the abstact is mostly meaningless. If you want to post something, post the relavent claim(s).
For example:
1. A method for running an application program in a computer network environment, comprising:
providing at least one client workstation and one network server coupled to said network environment, wherein said network environment is a distributed hypermedia environment;
executing, at said client workstation, a browser application, that parses a first distributed hypermedia document to identify text formats included in said distributed hypermedia document and for responding to predetermined text formats to initiate processing specified by said text formats; utilizing said browser to display, on said client workstation, at least a portion of a first hypermedia document received over said network from said server, wherein the portion of said first hypermedia document is displayed within a first browser-controlled window on said client workstation, wherein said first distributed hypermedia document includes an embed text format, located at a first location in said first distributed hypermedia document, that specifies the location of at least a portion of an object external to the first distributed hypermedia document, wherein said object has type information associated with it utilized by said browser to identify and locate an executable application external to the first distributed hypermedia document, and wherein said embed text format is parsed by said browser to automatically invoke said executable application to execute on said client workstation in order to display said object and enable interactive processing of said object within a display area created at said first location within the portion of said first distributed hypermedia document being displayed in said first browser-controlled window.
URL (Score:1, Informative)
Is it just me or does this patent seem vague and cover a lot of broad topics? (shakes head and wonders what kind of cave-dwelling morons work at the US patent office)
Re:hello are you foreign? (Score:2, Informative)
From WordNet (r) 1.7.1 (July 2002) [wn]: ironical adj 1: characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is; "madness, an ironic fate for such a clear thinker"; "it was ironical that the well-planned scheme failed so completely" [syn: {ironic}] 2: humorously sarcastic or mocking; "dry humor"; "an ironic remark often conveys an intended meaning obliquely"; "an ironic novel"; "an ironical smile"; "with a wry Scottish wit" [syn: {dry}, {ironic}, {wry}]
Bad data! Quicken web site has a BIG typo (Score:5, Informative)
Bill may be selling, but he hasn't sold 75% of his stock.
Settle? How can they "settle"? They LOST. (Score:1, Informative)
"Settlements" are made before the judgement is awarded. In this case the judgement has already been handed down. MS owes. Big time. However, they will of course drag it out in appeals indefinitely and do everything they can to not pay a cent. Even if they lose all court appeals in the end, they will still probably refuse to pay and tell both the plantiffs and the courts to go and f_ck off. Even the US federal govt is impotent to do anything to make them pay what is owed and is afraid of them.