- Monday, 23 November 2009
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Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever - Norman Mailer
Eolas sues 23 more tech companies
THE OUTFIT whose name sounds like a Lord of the Rings character and that nailed Microsoft in a patent lawsuit is chasing 23 other technology companies.
Eolas is using the same patent to go after every other tech company it can think of including Apple, Google, Adobe, Amazon, Ebay, Playboy, Yahoo, and Youtube.
At the centre of the row is a patent for implementing browser plug-ins in one form or another, plus another patent that addresses the use of asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX).
The patent was granted to Eolas and the University of California and addresses third-party browser plug-ins to run various forms of media as an "embedded program object", essentially a program that runs within another program.
The Vole was done over for its ActiveX in Internet Explorer. After lots of courtroom action Microsoft finally settled the case in 2003.
What is unusual about this case is that so many established companies named as defendants are infringing a patent that has been ruled valid by the US Patent and Trademark Office on three occasions.
It might force them all to consider arguing that software should not be patentable, an issue that is being reviewed now by the US Supreme Court in the case In re Bilski.
While some technology companies do not want a ban on software patents, others are tired of facing patent trolls. µ
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...and all of those companies listed are also patent trolls. The only way the US is going to reform its ridiculous and antiquated patent laws is if these kinds of lawsuits keep happening. When enough big players get hurt, maybe then we'll see some changes in congress.
so they include almost all tech company but IBM, maybe they didnt want to start a patent war
US patent trolling is a farce.
Abuse of privileges inevitably brings loss of freedom and rights.
But try telling that to the robber barons of WS who invariably funnel buckets of swill to the great brainwashed so that they believe that any regulation is the bane of any bureaucracy, which they also malign as was McCarthy's "pinko" commies, or as is-now-styled "Euro-socialists".
Meanwhile, the bureaucracy suffers in silence, having committed no crime other than if being the victim of political agendists' calling the kettle black.