Eolas patent invalid?

The Eolas vs. Microsoft case could have caused a lot of unpaid hours fixing your clients websites. Now you may not have to spend those hours.

Some months ago, the company Eolas sought to cause us webdesigners a lot of pain by claiming the patent on embedding plugins in a webpage. In the first trial, Microsoft was judged to pay Eolas $521 millon (!) for infringing the patent. Microsoft responded by saying they thought the patent was invalid, but they still started rewriting the IE Browser and the way it handled plugins and embedded technologies like Flash.

If IE is rebuilt, webpages would not load the Flash movie instantly, but rather display an ugly dialogue asking if it was OK to display something using Flash. Try telling you client that he should pay for fixing up something that happened in a court room across the atlantic... Can't you hear them say: "You'll have to fix that for free! You are the one that recommended Flash in the first place!"

Now, Microsoft has halted the rebuild of the worlds most used browser. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has invalidated one of the claims that are central to the case and that makes Microsoft sure that they'll win the upcoming appeal.

(via JD)
Read the full story at Reuters

 

 

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