MS to hobble ActiveX and Shockwave Flash in Internet Explorer?

AFTER THE SPECTACULAR $521 million judgement against Microsoft, for infringing on a patent that covers plugins in web browsers, no-one was particularly surprised to hear that the Megavole was planning an appeal. But at the same time, the software behemoth is considering what to do if it loses. Plugins are the helper programs run inside your browser and help you view content like PDF ( Acrobat) files.

Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, is known to dislike per-copy royalty agreements. This is not surprising, given the number of copies of their software sold, but with no guarantee that Eolas and Microsoft can agree on future royalties, Microsoft have indicated to W3C, the organisation that oversees standards on the web, that they are looking into what they can to change (or rip out of) Internet Explorer "in response to the ruling". We read that to mean "in order to avoid paying any more than we have to to Eolas".

Whether Microsoft is prepared to make changes that cause a lot of web pages to stop working is not yet clear.

The W3C organised an ad hoc meeting of interested parties to discuss how changes can be made. The meeting was hosted by Macromedia, not coincidentally, we are sure: As the originators of Shockwave Flash they are responsible for a lot of the plugin content on the web and they stand to lose a lot if Microsoft choose to emasculate the plugin support in Internet Explorer.

And in case MS-haters are feeling a little smug, they should consider that the implications of the patent are unlikely to be limited to only Volish software: If the patent stands as currently interpreted there are a number of Open Source and other products that are likely to be found to be infringing. And while Microsoft could probably find the cash in their piggy bank to pay Eolas, that's not going to be an option for any of the Open Source projects (and many of the others).

The W3C has also organised a mailing list to discuss solutions to the problem. Until now, a lot of the discussion has understandably centred on whether the patent can be invalidated by digging up some "prior art", a case of the patented technology being used or described before the filing of the patent by Eolas.

Since ActiveX has, to put it mildly, a controversial reputation amongst people who take an interest in computer security there are certainly people who see the silver lining in the whole business. Sadly, however, the patent claims aren't limited to plugin architectures with a dubious security framework: There's a whole range of clever web techniques that appear to fall under its scope.

Other large patent cases are ongoing against Microsoft, notably a case brought by InterTrust who claim to have patents covering a lot of the security technology that Microsoft use (eg. in the Xbox) and plan to use (eg. in Palladium). Intertrust has been having some success in the courts.

What Eolas and InterTrust have in common is that their main business is in "intellectual property", the sale of permission to use ideas. As such they don't have any significant end-user products of their own, but rely on collecting royalties from companies that do. That makes it hard to use the usual patent case defense: countersuing based on some patents from your own portfolio. If a company like this gets a patent on a key technology they can, to a large extent, dictate terms to the industry. (I won't mention Rambus in this connection since that usually results in a flood of email flames.)

From a European point of view it's worth considering whether this software patent hullabaloo is something we want to import from the other side of the pond. That decision is being made right now.

Large scale destructive changes to the way the Web works wouldn't exactly help popularise software patents amongst ordinary users. µ

L'INQ
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