FFII: Microsoft loses in EOLAS Patent Decision

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Microsoft lost in its fight against the "technology company" Eolas. Thats what online media and Eolas Technologies Inc. do report. The validity of the disputed "plugin patent" US 5,838,906 sustains. Due to patent infrignment Microsoft already got judged to pay more than 500 Mio. US$ to the favour of EOLAS, but as it first seemed was able to take successful steps on an unconventional law process. Already after the first EOLAS finding several standardisation panels (e.g. the W3C) held crisis sessions. Changes in Microsoft products as the IE are potentailly to expect. The "plugin patent" from Eolas is considered to ber very wide and does expand upon key functionalitys of WWW browsers.

Already on Wednesday the decision has been caried out that Patent US 5,838,906: Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document will be held up. By now it is unclear if the case is finally closed with that. The presentation of the University of California (which is the parent company of Eolas) does suggest this:

• The University of California's patent for Web-browser technology essential to the Internet was reaffirmed this week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, when it published its notice that the office has completed its re-examination process and will issue a re-examination certificate of the patent first challenged by Microsoft Corp. two years ago.

Related News in online media

• Bloomberg: Microsoft loses bid to have Web applications patent tossed out

• ZDNET AU: Microsoft loses in Eolas patent ruling

• IDG: Eolas patent decision goes against Microsoft

Involved partys

• University of California: U.S. Patent Office reaffirms University’s Web-browser technology patent

• Eolas Technologies Inc Website

• US PTO notice (auf University of California)

Comments

André Rebentisch, FFII

• Bad news for the internet. Microsoft failed to prevent the worst case scenario. The USPTO lost its face. I would like to remind you of EVP representative J. Würmeling. He hinted in his standard reply towards worried European citizens for EOLAS and did glorify that company as a successful small business that succeeds with software patents against the company Microsoft which is often blamed as "industry beast". Such sort of sympathy is alien to the experts. There is big worry. Several notorious optimists did project in a first reaction in our IRC channel a collapse of the much discussed US practice for software patents: "well, now I can go to sleep and have nice dreams

  after this good news hope the sw patent system will collapse" A bad awakening cannot be excluded.