Plugin Patent to Mean Changes in IE? 437
hexene writes "The W3C have issued an initial statement on the recent court case of Eolas v. Microsoft in regards to US Patent 5,838,906. The patent relates to the embedding of objects in hypermedia documents, and Microsoft has indicated they will have to make changes to Internet Explorer as a result of the ruling. There may also be far-reaching effects to both other web browser vendors and page authors. Check out the public mailing list to discuss the various issues." See the previous Eolas story for background.
Re:You would think... (Score:5, Informative)
Result of Lawsuit: Hypocrisy (Score:1, Informative)
Like it or not, most people coming to this site do in fact use IE. Now as good or bad an app that IE may be (an arugment for another time), this lawsuit results in Microsoft being forced to remove a feature that, potentially, a lot of us use.
So even if you are still the knee-jerk hate-Microsoft type, think about how angry you'd be if this happened to YOUR favorite app. Just because this hurts Microsoft, it doesn't make it a good thing by any stretch.
Re:Hypermedia, embedding obvious - (mini-rant) (Score:5, Informative)
"Hypermedia" is what we used to call the often proprietary amalgamation of hypertext and multimedia back before Tim Berners-Lee came along and sorted it all out for us. I don't know about how far back prior art on this goes, but I was quite happily embedding dynamic clocks, calenders and such like in a multi-user hypertext authoring system at Liverpool University in the early 90's. Embedded images, sound and even video was *already* old-hat at this point.
It was an in-house developed tool called MUCH (Many Users Creating Hypertext) written in the Andrew toolkit (think a forerunner of GTk/Qt) and running on HP-UX, if you were wondering.
Re:That stinks. (Score:5, Informative)
The Patent (Score:3, Informative)
Personally I think software patents are evil, as I'm sure many here do. Computer Science means learning from the work of others and advancing the field. Someone save us from the USPTO.
BTW, Does anyone know if Eolas got their $521 Million?
Eolas spoke (Score:5, Informative)
But what if they won't settle for money? This brings us to Mike Doyle, who runs tiny Eolas Technology Inc., which controls a patent that covers embedding plug-ins, applets, scriptlets, or ActiveX Controls into Web pages -- the use of any algorithm that implements dynamic, bi-directional communications between an app embedded in a Web page and external applications. That more or less defines how the World Wide Web is used today. As I have written before, Eolas is suing Microsoft for patent infringement, and has been generally wiping the floor with Redmond. Of course, so did the DoJ, and look how THAT turned out. The suit comes to trial in the spring and should be very interesting, not just because of the principles involved, but also because Mike Doyle and Eolas insist they are looking for more than just money.
"It would sure be nice for someone to actually consider all of this from our point of view, rather than MS's," wrote Doyle in a recent message to me. "It amazes me that everyone just assumes that MS will be able to merely write a check and make the whole thing go away. What if someone went through the following, purely theoretical, of course
"Is there any practical settlement amount that is worth more to Eolas than a victory at trial? Considering the facts in the case and the magnitude of the stakes here, a highly likely outcome is that it will actually go to trial, and, once it does, that a jury will award us both damages and an injunction. Injunction is the key word here. That is what patent rights provide: the power to exclude. What if we were to just say no? Or, what if some other big player were to acquire or merge with us? What if only one best-of-breed browser could run embedded plug-ins, applets, ActiveX controls, or anything like them, and it wasn't IE? How competitive would the other browsers be without those capabilities? How would that change the current dynamics in the Industry?"
"One possible scenario is that Eolas would have the power necessary to re-establish the browser-as-application-platform as a viable competitor to Windows. That would be an interesting outcome, wouldn't it? How much would that be worth? The Web-OS concept, where the browser is the interface to all interactive apps on the client side, was always a killer idea. It still is. It lost momentum not because it wasn't economically or technically feasible, but because MS made it unlikely for anybody but them to make money on the Web-client side. Therefore, nobody could justify the necessary investment to take a really-serious shot at it. It doesn't have to be that way, does it? Just think of how we could use this patent to re-invigorate and expand the competitive landscape in this recently-moribund industry. What if we could do what the DOJ couldn't, and in the process make Eolas and everybody else, possibly excluding MS, richer? Wouldn't Eolas stand to profit more in such a scenario than any kind of pre-trial settlement could provide? Wouldn't everybody else?"
"The last couple of years in IT seem to have convinced people that the current status quo will continue indefinitely. They seem to have forgotten what seemed so obvious as little as three years ago, that change is the only invariance. That axiom has always proven out in the past, and I'm certain it will continue to do so in the future."
So will Mike Doyle give in to the Microsoft checkbook or will he opt, instead, to change the world of IT as we know it, knocking Microsoft down to size along the way? And notice how he referred to mergers and investors and being acquired? What if an IBM or an AOL or some party behind door number three was to do exactly that?
As I said, it should be a VERY interesting trial.
Re:"plug-ins" = ...specifically what? (Score:3, Informative)
My uninformed opinion (from reading only the abstract) is that the MIME type model is not at risk, because
Re:Patent scope (Score:4, Informative)
It's a long time since I used it, and in a LISP environment, of course, there's really nos such concept as a plugin, but there was analogous functionality in NoteCards [virginia.edu].
I would have thought a NoteCards node type was highly analogous to a mime type, and the 'LISP command' was highly analogous to a plugin.
Re:That stinks. (Score:3, Informative)
But that also makes things like this [viruslist.com] possible. IIRC, the virus comes to you as a zipped MIME/html file. You unzip the file and double-click it and it extracts the virus binary from a base64 encoded section of the document.
This was the SOB that forced me to add ZIP and HTML files to the RenAttach [pc-tools.net] bad list on our mail server.
More info on the patent (Score:4, Informative)
one of the answers is interesting.
Q. What is the patented technology that was at issue in the case?
A. The patented technology is a key component of the interactivity available on the Internet today. It allows web page developers to embed interactive programs in Web pages. A browser, equipped with the University of California's patented technology, is able to deliver that interactivity to the user. For example, the technology is used often with stock information, video players, games, virtual real estate tours and other interactive content on the Web. The patent allows the Web to be a platform for fully interactive embedded applications.
Sounds like this has broader implications for the Internet at large which the web community may regret. It is not patenting hyperlinks, but I think it gets close.
Re:You would think... (Score:2, Informative)
Also, they laid out a good noninfringement case by contending that the "identify and locate" step in the patent was carried out by COM, part of Microsoft's OS that existed well before the claimed invention, and not the browser as required by the claims.
I don't think the issue here was whether or not Microsoft was careful about shiping infringing products, but it goes to show that a jury trial over a software patent is a complete crap shoot. The way I see it, either the jury didn't understand the patent laws at hand, or they didn't understand the technology (or just didn't like Microsoft).
Re:SVG (Score:2, Informative)
Adobe's SVG Site [adobe.com]
Corel's SVG Viewer [corel.com]
Mozilla's SVG Implementation [mozilla.org]
(note: it's not turned on in mozilla.org builds, but you can download older versions with SVG turned on, or build mozilla yourself).
Or, implement it [w3.org] yourself
Re:You would think... (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't a company - it is a person and about 4 lawyers. Some dude wrote this patent 9 years ago, and now he is worth $500 million (at least).
The patent is ridiculous and I hardly see the patent holder writing their own browser or selling their own system.
That is pretty much exactly what he wants to do. OF course, he will start with $520 million of Microsoft's money...and work on making an OS through the browser. No one else will be allowed to use bi-directional data flow through a browser until 2015!
Microsoft will, of course, do their best with a work-around.
There are probably 100 patents filed for every patent that evolves into an implementation. Maybe 1000. The US PTO is morally bankrupt, and the future of innovation through small inventors is essentially dead. But this case is at least kinda interesting in a soap-opera kinda way.
Re:Closer look at the patent (Score:4, Informative)
No, it's completely obvious. Given a statement of the problem, any normal software engineer at the time would've decided to switch applications based on content type.
Commercial products that handed off to a different helper program based on a content-type string date from 1988 or earlier. (Although back then, the "content-type" string was often just the final 3 characters of a filename. But it's the same idea)
We just passed the eighth anniversary! (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft is being sued from all directions. (Score:2, Informative)
Eolas = knowledge (Score:3, Informative)
Re:uhhh... (Score:2, Informative)
In those days the 800lb gorilla on OSs was CP/M from Digital Research Incorporated. DRI gave IBM the run around and the deal failed, so IBM asked microsoft to do a custom OS that worked like CP/M but didn't violate patents (that's why the prompt became C: instead of C/).
How did MS get DOS? They took a risk and bought something that "sortaworked". I know, I had QDOS and MS-DOS 1.0, DOS lived because (wow) it worked, QDOS (almost) worked.
DOS was bought and paid for, that was how they got it.