Posted on 03/02/2005 4:24:56 PM PST by Eagle9
Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said a federal appeals court has overturned a lower-court verdict that found the software giant guilty of infringing on a browser-related technology patent and ordered the company to pay more than $520 million in damages.
The appellate court also sent the case back to the U.S. District Court in Chicago, giving Microsoft "the opportunity to tell the jury the whole story of how this technology was developed and present evidence that shows that Eolas (Technologies Inc.) did not invent this technology," the Redmond, Wash., company said in a statement.
Microsoft said the ruling was a "clear affirmation of our position."
In August 2003, a federal court jury sided with Eolas in its patent-infringement suit against Microsoft, awarding more than $520 million to the plaintiff. Eolas founder Michael Doyle was granted the patent while he was an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
US Patent No. 5,838,906 covers technology that enables a browser to call programs over the Internet to display streaming audio and video, advanced graphics and other content within a singe web page. The technology has become a standard within the language used to write web pages, called Hypertext Markup Language. The World Wide Web Consortium, which has asked federal officials to revoke the patent, controls the development of HTML.
Microsoft claims the technology covered by the patent was developed by other people, particularly Pei-yuan Wei and his colleagues at O'Reilly and Associates, who Microsoft says are the "true pioneers of this technology."
The company said the latest ruling would give it the opportunity "to present evidence that Eolas knowingly withheld information about Pei-Wei's invention to the patent office."
The W3C, a leading Internet standard body, took the unusual step in October 2003 of asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to revoke the patent that it claimed threatened "substantial economic and technical damage" to the web. It was the first time the W3C had asked that a patent be revoked.
In its letter to USPTO, the W3C claimed the Eolas patent is invalid, because its ideas had previously been published as prior art, which is a legal term. Prior art was not considered in the Microsoft trial, nor when the patent was granted, the standards body said. Therefore, the patent should be invalidated.
I told all my neighbors that ruling was not right and am so glad it's been reversed.
The whole software patent business is one great big honking mess.
Should have little to no effect. If this is a technology without a patent (open to all) then anyone can use it.
We should expect to see other browsers with it. Another possible improvement for Firefox and maybe an update to IE7 when it gets released later this year (Microsoft has publically announced the new browser).
Perfect question, as the original ruling in favor of Eolas actually threatened open source browsers in the long run more than it actually threatened Microsoft.
This should embolden those groups to push their products out to more users, without the same level of fear that potential damages are escalating. It also should be much more comforting to large user bases of open source browsers, who are legally liable for using products that infringe upon the intellectual property of others, as open source products rarely if ever offer any legal protection from liability for end use, known as "idemnification".
Will it make any actual difference in the proliferation of OSS browsers? Doubtful, because only a tiny segment of society actually understand these laws and their intricacies.
"indemnification", sorry.
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