Here's a sweet pointer from Tomalak's Realm: it's news that the PTO has ordered an examination of the patent in the Eolas/Microsoft case:

In what could be good news for the Web, the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of the '906 patent, which was the subject of a patent infringement lawsuit this summer brought by Eolas against Microsoft.

Issued in 1998 to Michael Doyle of Eolas Technologies, the patent (#5,838,906) covers the ability to embed and control applications (or objects) in a web browser. Doyle succeeded in obtaining a $500M judgement against Microsoft. In the aftermath, Microsoft said that changes to the browser were necessary to work around paying royalties on the patent, and that these changes would impact developers who create and maintain web pages. Many believe that the patent would also affect other technologies such as Flash and Java as well, which are launched from a browser.

On October 23, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) filed a request for re-examination, citing prior art that defined the early HTML standard, written by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Raggett.

Here's more on this from the W3C itself. What a shame they don't have individual memberships!

06:29 PM | linkme | home