Microsoft Holds Off on Eolas Patent Changes 239
Walkiry writes "As reported by Reuters, Microsoft believes the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office might come to the rescue and cancel the patent that was going to force them into changing the behaviour of Internet Explorer. Maybe the Patent Office is finally getting a clue? Or is it Microsoft's long arm? Time will tell..."
Forget it's Microsoft for a second.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope this can become a reference case for defeating further rediculous patents.
Regardless of Whether You Hate Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever Microsoft is guilty of, I don't recall it using patent violations as a tactic. They have created a lot of wealth for a lot of people. I can't say the same for the patent holders in this case.
Patents the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Forget it's Microsoft for a second.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If it works like the courts (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Patents the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of patents that are being granted that are obvious solutions to a problem (eg. 1 click patent) or not original (eg. this one) is staggering.
No, it must be Microsoft... (Score:2, Insightful)
Decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now the internet standard have been set. It doesn't matter what new proposals come out of the W3C or how well other browsers will perfect their implementations, the internet will always be suspended at the greats common denominator (which is, in this case, the functionality of IE 6). No-one in their right mind is going to abandon support for the browser that 90% of potential customers use.
By levelling the playing field a bit more, this would mean that webmasters and designers would not be afraid to move on and leave IE behind. By doing so, Microsoft would be forced to keep up to maintain market share.
However, there is one big caveat - and that is the Eolas doesn't use their win against Microsoft to go after everyone else. This is a pretty big if and definely one that cannot be easily discounted.
If Eolas do decide to follow suit with other browser manufacturers then any "leg up" that has been gained will be lost, IE will still be dominant and the WWW standards will stop. However if Eolas doesn't go after anyone else then this is quite some benifit.
Unfortunately, banking on Eolas winning and not sueing anyone else is just too much of a risk. Which means that, in this case, the best course of action to is come to Microsofts defence, get it overturned and accept that for WWW standard to move on (which will necessitate the removal of IE from the top spot), it must happen in a different way.
Microsoft wearing the white hat (Score:4, Insightful)
But will they? Of course not. The stupid patents are stupid to Microsoft only when they prevent Microsoft from writing code. It's true that they haven't been litigating violations of their own patents to date (at least I think that's true) but it does appear that that's all about to change as they resort to bare knuckles tactics with the OSS community; the ridiculous Office XML patent [slashdot.org] being a good case in point.
I wish I was wrong. But I'm not.
.....but whose Intellectual Property IS it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents are broken down into small "claims", and a patent can easily have hundreds of these, if not thousands. Even the most ridiculously simple idea gets divided into minute, easily digestible sections. One such section I remember was included to explain the concept of a ZIP code, and how the company filing the patent was NOT the arbiter or owner of that concept, but was using it as a reference within their work, and that this was not a determining factor in their technology (they could have easily used another large-scale locational identifier, such as area code). Hence, their patent could be defensible when someone claimed in court that it was based on technology they had no claaim to ownership of.
But worse, the point of the average patent is not to delineate what it is, but what it's not. If your patent includes as part of its concepts anything which you did not personally conceive of, and which you have not attributed to their original creators, That claim becomes indefensible. Toss out one claim, and the whole patent is invalid. It's a house of cards, and that's how patent attorneys litigate patent cases.
When push comes to shove, Amazon knew exactly what they were doing (certainly, their lawyers did) when they patented "one click", and they did it because a patent is precisely designed to allow the applicant to carve out as massive of a piece of intellectual pie as the patent office deems acceptable. Eolas is doing the same, in a different light, it would appear.
If you can state a case, without prior art being an issue, for patenting Earth, feel free. The rest of us will either have to move, or beat you up you and steal your planet.
In cases like this, where someone else comes up with a basic idea, manages to patent it, then extends their idea to encompass the known universe, perhaps the whole issue of reexamining the validity of the original patent should be considered. It would certainly cut back on the "I invented soil, it's mentioned in my patent" suits.
Two faced (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, if he said it was prior art, then it was prior art.
JAVA??? (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate things that make my life more difficult.
Re:Decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
And when they decide to go after Mozilla or Opera because they didn't get enough money from suing Microsoft...by then those other browsers will have a bigger market share, according to your bizarre world anyway. What's bad for one company is bad for all of them.
Re:Regardless of Whether You Hate Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems in general that for large companies (eg. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, etc) patents are more of a defensive tool, but for small companies (eg. Eolas) they can sometimes be more of an offensive tool.
Re:Decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry but this is a ludicrous point of view to hold. Are you saying that Eolas be allowed to use the law in a clearly immoral (and illegal) way?
We should all be fighting attempts to patent basic ideas like those of the WWW and calling for reform of the patent system to aviod these sorts of patents (as opposed to real physical inventions that are clearly original and which it has taken the inventor time to create).
Why would they only go after M$? Even if they do don't you think that this is extremely unfair on M$. M$ have as many rights as anyone else. For anti-M$ fanatics out there lets put this another way: by arguing this is OK, you are going as low as M$ by saying that certain companies (M$) should be blocked out of the market by anti-competitive reasons (something that M$ has done). If others do this to M$ they will feel it is OK to do, and you will become just as bad as them.
As someone who never uses MSIE, I fail to see what the point in increasing the share of real (non-MSIE) WWW browsers is. I do not use them but why should I support forcing other people to do the same as me (in this case using immoral anti-competitive means). OK, yes people should be made aware of alternatives, but so what if people want to stick with the default that comes with MSW? People should have choice.
I use Mozilla-based browsers and the aim of the Mozilla Project (and I'd imagine the other free-software browsers) is to make the best (most standards-compliant user-friendly &c) WWW browser -- not to get the biggest market share. If Mozilla aimed to do that they would just be making themselves like MSIE. Why should the Mozilla community (developers, users) care if MSIE has more share.
This has already happened for any webmasters that care about their users. For instance, nearly all sites are compatible with Gecko because webmasters just cannot ignore 5%-35% of their users (depending on which independent survey you believe) -- I think it is probably nearer 5%-10%.If they go so low as to sue M$ over this totally spurious patent, why would they not sue everyone else they can think of to maximise their profits from their patent (using lawsuits)?
In all cases, the best course of action to follow who you think is in the right.
yeah right! (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, unless we get some real patent reform out of this, this will just go to show that you are totally fucked unless you are a Big Player(R).
Perhaps I'm just cynical these days?
"Not our problem either"? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm hoping this is just bad reporting, but if the patent office is granting dubious patents and letting the courts sort them out, perhaps somebody should tell the courts to actually do that.
Re:Forget it's Microsoft for a second.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when has Microsoft attempted to enforce a patent in order to shut down Linux?
Microsoft could probably do this if they wanted to. But there are many reasons why they are unlikely to do so. First there is IBM, Linux almost certainly infringes some Microsoft patent, Windows almost certainly infringes some IBM patent. It is a zero sum game.
The other reason is anti-trust. If Microsoft tried that type of thing they would probably be ordered to license.
Finaly the whole Microsoft ethos is built on competition. They don't want to kill competition entirely, they want to beat it up a bit, ok a lot. But if they kill them they have to find some new opponent. Netscape really were somewhat stupid here, when Windows 95 launched Bill Gates gave a widely reported speech that said 'OK thats Apple done for, do't get complacent, there are lots of companies out there to replace us'. Then that twit Marc Andressen says 'we are going to leave Windows as no more than a baddly debugged set of device drivers'. Whammo! Bill finds his new opponent.
Re:nice (Score:3, Insightful)
That would undermine the social benefit of the patent process: making these processes available for the public to use. In the long run, patents benefit more people than trade secrets do.
Re:Decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
You people don't know who Eolas even is--
It's not a really a company, its just one guy, Dr. Michael Doyle, at the University of California.
He has specifically stated that he has NO intention to hurt the rest of the community---Just Microsoft.
Microsoft has worked with him at one point, and he is peeved off that he never got compensated for his work.
Let me point you at this Cringley interview:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pu
The meat of the article:
"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."
Seems like a FINE idea to me---Not like MS doesn't hold enough patents on various aspects of the browser.
The fight against MS is a war, harsh and cruel. MS is willing to break the rules. MS is willing to use unreasonable patents. MS is willing to be dirty and underhanded.
There is nothing wrong with a little bit of underhandedness against them.
Re:Didn't read the CIFS license? (Score:1, Insightful)
> projects. (Or as they called them "viral licenses".)
Not all OSS licenses are 'viral'.
> MS is not above using patents to club the competition into submission.
Everyone, including MS would eb served by a Samba with a BSD style license.
Yes, MS would pick it up and use parts of it most likely, but it would effectively put an end to the cat and mouse game of changing specs and having to reverse engineer them, resulting in a better working samba and better compatability with MS platforms.
I'm not against the GPL, but I can see very well that MS thinks it threatens its business model, and as a result wants to fight it. The example you give (samba) however is a bad one, and so is the assumption that the GPL is the only OSS license out there or that there are no 'non viral' licenses that are recognized as such and are OSS.
Isn't this already a good idea? (Score:3, Insightful)
And why isn't this a good idea already? Wouldn't it be nice to know what is about to run on a new page you've entered for the first time before it runs?
Re:Forget it's Microsoft for a second.... (Score:4, Insightful)
"The other reason is anti-trust. If Microsoft tried that type of thing they would probably be ordered to license."
Unless they license utterly freely, the GPL will not work favourably.
IMHO, your first point is absolutely right. The IBM factor is the only thing which has prevented some Microsoft-lacky from attacking Linux on patent grounds.
But if some Eolas-like company comes out of the woodwork... a one-patent no product company and attacks Linux for doing something like displaying text on a screen... that would be bad. It's not a zero-sum game if you can hide all your assets behind a limited liability wall.
To do this you would need: Some really good lawyers, a few million dollars to pay them, a really sharp patent, very small corporation with a very short history, one asset (the patent), and a sick mind.
Another way to look at it is: if SCO never produced any software, they wouldn't be targetable by IBM's patents.
Re:Regardless of Whether You Hate Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say the same thing.
And you know what? If it were me, I'd beat the hell out of MS with my patent club, and then license my patent to anyone else, for free, as long as it isn't MS.
Remember, there is nothing to stop your from arbitrarily licensing your patents.
You could refuse to license someone because their dog smelled bad.
This guy has a bone to pick with MS. He's got his 1/2 billion dollar victory. He's got the opportunity to become a big player in the browser market---
He could license his patent to everyone else, for free, because everyone else accounts for what, 5% of the market?
The Internet Browser market is dominated by MS. He doesn't need to sue the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, Netscape, etc. . . It doesn't do him any good, and any money to be made along those lines would pale in comparison to the $500 mil he got from MS.
He's said as much, and that he is more than willing to grant said licenses.
If it were me (and this guy sounds like a good guy, from all the interviews I've read, and from the University of California endorsement), I'd be doing EXACTLY what he is doing.
I wouldn't cry foul until he refuses a free license to the Mozilla foundation, etc. . . .