Eolas

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Eolas (an acronym for Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems, and Irish for "knowledge") is a United States company, and patent licensee. It was founded in 1994 by Dr. Michael David Doyle. His UCSF team has claimed to have created the first web browser that supported plugins. They demonstrated it at Xerox PARC, in November 1993, at the second Bay Area SIGWEB meeting. The claim has been contested by Pei-Yuan Wei, developer of the earlier Viola browser, a claim supported by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other Web developers.

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[edit] The Patent

Patent 5,838,906, titled "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document," was filed on October 17, 1994 and granted on November 17, 1998.

In Fall of 2003, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the Director of the W3 Consortium Tim Berners-Lee wrote to Under Secretary of Commerce, asking to invalidate this patent, in order to "eliminate this major impediment to the operation of the Web". Leaders of Open Source Community sided with Microsoft in fighting the patent due to its threat to the free nature of the Web and to the basic established HTML standards. The specific concerns of having one company (Eolas) controlling a critical piece of the Web framework were cited.

In March 2004, the USPTO re-examined and initially rejected the patent. Eolas submitted a rebuttal in May 2004. On September 27, 2005, the USPTO upheld the validity of the patent. The PTO ruling rejected the relevance of Pei Wei's Viola code to the Eolas patent. According to the University of California press release, "In its 'Reasons for Patentability/Confirmation' notice, the patent examiner rejected the arguments for voiding UC's previously approved patent claims for the Web-browser technology as well as the evidence presented to suggest that the technology had been developed prior to the UC innovation. The examiner considered the Viola reference the primary reference asserted by Microsoft at trial as a prior art publication and found that Viola does 'not teach nor fairly suggest that instant 906 invention, as claimed. [1]

[edit] Litigation

Microsoft declined to license the technology when it was offered to them (and others) in 1994. [2]

In 1999 Eolas filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against Microsoft over validity and use of the patent. Eolas won the initial case in August 2003 and was awarded damages of $521m from Microsoft for infringement. The District Court reaffirmed its decision in January 2004.

In June 2004 Microsoft appealed the case to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In March 2005 the District Court judgment was remanded, but the infringement and damages parts of the case were upheld. The appeals court ruled that the two Viola-related exhibits that had been thrown out of the original trial needed to be shown to a jury in a retrial. Microsoft quickly filed for a rehearing.

In October 2005, The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear Microsoft's appeal, leaving intact the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of Eolas with respect to foreign sales of Microsoft Windows. However, the remand to District Court has not been heard yet.

[edit] Browser Changes

In October 2003 Microsoft proposed a change to its Internet Explorer browser in an attempt to avoid having to pay license fees to Eolas. A decision to change the browser, rather than to license the patent, would force a disruption in the normal functioning of millions of existing unmaintained web pages that use multimedia plug-ins, and would cause ripple effects through the web, causing re-design of tens of millions of web pages that are currently being maintained.

Other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari might have to implement a similar change to avoid infringement, or to license Eolas' patent. Dr. Doyle has stated that Eolas would offer royalty-free licenses to non-commercial entities. A statement on Eolas' web site clarifies the company's policy with regard to such licenses. [3] Eolas has not yet indicated intent to pursue further cases. [4] As of 2007, no Eolas' license has been granted to the leading open-source browser, Mozilla Firefox.

In February 2006, Microsoft modified its web browser to side-step the Eolas patent. All ActiveX controls will now need to be "activated" before they can be interacted with. Users will need to click once on an ActiveX control before being able to use its interface. A workaround is to load in the object/embed tag from an external Javascript file. In June 2006, Opera Software released version 9 of its Opera browser for Windows and other operating systems, with modifications similar to Microsoft's ones.

A potential workaround that Microsoft (or any other browser creator) may employ to avoid the need for users to "activate" the ActiveX controls would be to issue a plugin for IE that intercepts all HTML communication before it reaches the browser. This plugin would parse the HTML looking for OBJECT or EMBED tags, and replace them with Javascript calls as described in the above methods. In this manner, you would have a mechanism for scripting the browser, which technically avoids the patent's claim (assuming it is even a valid patent to begin with). A result of this is that when a user 'Viewed Page Source', they would not see the HTML as it originated from the Web Server—rather they would see the altered source (with injected Javascript) as it was interpreted by the browser. The plugin would not be in violation of the patent, since all it is doing is removing the markup which the patent's claim challenges. The browser would not be in violation of the patent since the patent does not cover scripting.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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