As Director of the W3C (not to mention inventor of HTML and the Web), Tim Berners-Lee has written to the US Patent and Trademark Office in protest against the Eolas ‘906 Patent.
In case you are unaware, the patent lays claim that Eolas invented the concept of browser plug-ins. Eolas tested the patent against Microsoft and won in the courts, the upshot being that future versions of Internet Explorer will be crippled for pages containing embedded media. This will affect RealAudio and RealVideo streaming, QuickTime video, Flash and Shockwave players, Adobe’s PDF document Reader and SVG Viewer, Sun’s Java plug-in, and all the rest besides. So far no other browser manufacturers have been targetted, but they too are at risk.
Appealing to common sense, Berners-Lee explains in his letter that:
The impact of the ‘906 patent reaches far beyond a single vendor and even beyond those who could be alleged to infringe the patent. The existence of the patent and associated licensing demands compels many developers of Web browsers, Web pages, and many other important components of the Web to deviate from the fundamental technical standards that enable the Web to function as a coherent system. In many cases, those who will be forced to incur the cost of modifying Web pages or software applications do not even themselves infringe the patent.
Berners-Lee goes on to contesting the validity of the patent, providing ample evidence of prior art:
For example, more than a year before the claims of the ‘906 patent was filed, a word processing program called Write, provided with Microsoft Windows 3.1, enabled users to embed into Write documents graphic images created with the Paint program. The Write program would then invoke the Paint program to display the illustration within the same window as the rest of the document. Thus even without considering the several prior art publications annexed to our Section 3.01 filing, it is apparent that the ‘906 patent added nothing to the art – it only applied a well known concept in the display of documents to the display of a particular kind of document – Web pages.
Let us hope that common sense prevails. Unfortunately that commodity seems in short supply at the US Patents and Trademarks office. Incidentally, I could not find a single mention of the Eolas situation on any of the UK broadsheet archives – very disappointing.
Aaron H. wrote:
There appears to be better prior art than what has been introduced into evidence by the courts thus far. It popped up at a patent lawyers blog, here:
http://nip.blogs.com/patent/2004/11/cloak_and_dagge.html
The US#5495581 patent mentioned by that attorney has a filing date of October 15, 1993, which is more than one year earlier than the Eolas 906 patent. Additionally, several of the “questions” raised in court about the current references of record, appear to be overcome by the ‘581 patent. The blog story seems to suggest that the inventor of the ‘581 patent may have been aiming at something beyond just embedding objects. An analysis of the relevant portions of the ‘581 document seems to support this suggestion.
Chris Ray wrote:
I’m a little concerned that no one is paying attention to this case anymore. I’m a software developer and recently a client of the company I work for asked us to review this case. What I learned from the whole thing is that the patent process in the US with regards to software in particular is broken.
With the matter apparently headed toward a reasonable resolution, people have stopped following the case. Outside the lens of public scrutiny, Eolas and the unwitting PTO are working surreptitiously to revive the patent most people thought was long buried. In the process, Eolas is presenting arguments that both fly in the face of common sense and contradict key positions they took during trial. Worse yet, the PTO seems to be buying it.
The creation of patent holding companies whose business plans are based on acquiring and licensing patents will surely lead to more cases of litigation over alleged infringements. This is not good for the industry and I certainly hope the USPTO sees this as an opportunity to send a message and address the growing call for patent reform. More and more people in our industry are becoming very concerned about the entire patent process.
You might find the results of our investigation interesting.
Check it out at www.iticentral.com/906Full.html