'Eolas' Browser Plug-in Patent Case Rises Again

eldavojohn writes "A legal battle that has been around since 1999 and seemingly ended in 2005 now rears its head again. In a confusing move, the USPTO 'reissued a Microsoft patent last week covering the same concepts outlined in the Eolas patent and with wording mirroring that of the Eolas patent. With both companies holding identical patents, the USPTO will now play King Solomon and decide which parent gets custody of the baby.' Both the Microsoft & Eolas patents are available online."

Any chance in hell they'll both get revoked...

[bbernard]

...for being "obvious?"

This is why Microsoft should shut up

[gilesjuk]

They keep going on about Linux and how it infringes on their patents. I'm sure Microsoft's products infringe on quite a few too, it's just many companies don't have the time and money to spend suing Microsoft.

Re:No.

[CastrTroy]

This is my biggest beef with software patents. Software already has copyright protecting it. It also has trade secrets protecting it (at least in closed source software). And it has patents. And in all the patents i've seen, I've never seen a full source code disclosure of a working model. So, now when the patent expires, you still can't dupicate it (assuming it's not trivial) because you have to figure out all the source code on your own. As far as I'm concerned, copyright and trade secrets should be enough to keep your software safe.

And it is because...

[jd]

...King Solomon reckoned that one who was genuine would be compassionate that his technique worked. (This is independent of whether the event actually happened.) A derivative of this can be found in the puzzle of walking up to two people, one who will always lie and one who will always tell the truth. You need to know the answer to a yes/no question, but can only ask one person one question. What do you ask that will guarantee the right answer? (In the biblical case, substitute imposter for person who lies, and one who tells the truth for the real mother.)

Obviously, Solomon's situation - and solution - differed somewhat from the classical problem and answer in the details, but underlying it is the same basic idea, which is to force the liar to stay consistent and the honest person to change.

The USPO (and all other patent offices) rely on a high level of honesty, as they stand, but what if a variant of King Solomon's approach could be used, when rival claims exist? Have a way of putting the claims on the spot such that the real claimant will concede something before any false claimants would? Mind you, that might not work - current culture is designed to put self above all else, then both would rather rip the intellectual baby in half. It would only work with ideas developed by people who primarily care that the customers get the products. For example, I could easily see a humanitarian who develops a cure for some deadly disease preferring that the product be developed by someone else than not at all. That's not going to happen very often, though.

Nonetheless, I believe that such methods are inevitable, eventually. The system as it stands doesn't scale and frequently doesn't work well - if at all. Somebody will have to develop filtering techniques that allow false and fraudulent claims to be detected much more easily - and preferably by anyone who wants to apply those techniques. The patent pending scheme is supposedly so that problems can be found - well, that's all fine and good, if there's any way to find said problems. If a programmatic test can be found to do at least some of the filtering, then all the USPO needs is to distribute the appropriate BOINC clinet. Eventually, this must happen, as there's simply more work than can humanly be done in the time alloted and the system, the inventors and the innovators are suffering as a result.

Re:Any chance in hell they'll both get revoked...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty standard here to take the title or first paragraph or so of the patent description and jump to the assumption that this is all they have. But this is almost always wrong.

Agreed. The best way to skim a patent is to go straight for the claims, as they are the most important for interpreting the scope of the legal scope of the patent, claim 1 usually being the broadest and most important. Here's claim 1 from the Microsoft patent:

We claim:

1. A method of invoking system commands from a mark-up language electronic book document associated with a computer running an operating system and having predefined system commands, the method comprising the steps of: (a) receiving an indication that a link in the mark-up language electronic book document has been selected; (b) locating an alias within the link; (c) reading an instruction located within the link; (d) identifying a predefined system command associated with the alias; and (e) executing the predefined system command associated with the alias; wherein the identifying and executing steps are performed if the instruction is to invoke the predefined system command; and wherein the instruction is X-MSR1INVOKE.

Let's see...

a. click a link
b. figure out what the link is pointing to
c. read the instruction at the location the link is pointing to
d. identify associated system command and
e. execute!

Except for the fact that it is associated with a computer running an operating system, I suppose that is fairly obvious...

However, you can have individual claims of a patent held obvious and be granted others, so don't stop at claim 1, because the later claims narrow the scope and may be upheld even if claim 1 isn't.

I am ANAL, but not a lawyer.

Could be valid, but shouldn't matter.

[Kaenneth]

When this idea was 'invented', web browsers were new, and the idea of a browser plug-in was to allow the playing of media, like .GIF's, .WAV's, and .FLI's on a web page.

Taking that idea of a plug in, writing one that makes it's own connection to a server to provide interactive data appears to be the basic 'invention'.

When I looked through Google Groups (USENET Archive) I could find nothing mentioned prior to then that mentioned an interactive plugin.

My thought is, because it's such a bad, horrible, wrong idea.

Browser plug-ins are not portable, between platforms, OS's or browsers. They run in native code, and need hardware access to render video/audio and access the network making them difficult to secure. They hurt maintainability, accessability and localizability. They can be used for DOS attacks on third parties. Have version compatibility issues, etc. etc. You're basically throwing away the entire point of a standards based browser, in favor of a single-use executable.

Patenting browser plugins that get embedded in pages was like patenting shooting yourself in the foot.

I wonder if we can sue...

[RufusFish]

Our company spent upwards of half a million dollars revising code so that the 'click to activate' crap wouldn't show up in IE. Our team spent at least $40k.

Though mildly irritating for your average at-home browser, a message saying anything about 'clicking to active' an 'Object' is a barrier of entry for someone who is using software to learn to read at a readiness level; we couldn't just 'leave it be'.

Now that it gets reversed? I'd like to have that chunk o' change back, that's for sure.

Re:I'm glad a read the article

[rs79]

"On the other hand, Netscape has had plugins since about 1994, so both patents should be declared void."

In the fall of 1993 Jim Mercer showed me a mpg plugin for NCSA Mosaic in Toronto.

(I quit my consulting gig the next day to do web stuff)