October 07th 2003 | Jens C Brynildsen

Macromedia responds to Eolas case

You may have heard of the Microsoft/Eolas patent case. Eolas is a company that claims the patent to embedding plugins and applets in a web page. This will affect the Flash plugin and all your Flash content for the web.

Eolas recently won a court case in the US that prompted intensive meeting activity in Silicon Valley. The judge in the case ordered Microsoft to pay Eolas $521 million for breach of their patent on plugins and applets. In addition, Microsoft were to pay $1,47 for each copy of their operating systems sold in the future. Several have claimed that the patent is invalid since the idea is rather general and several others did the same before the Eolas patent holders.

It's fairly obvious that this patent is being enforced just to blackmail companies, so Microsoft had to deal with this and get around the patent. Macromedia and the Flash plugin would suffer badly if Microsoft just removed all plugins in IE to avoid the patent, so a new way of doing plugins was required.

The technology is still just being tested, but this is how it will affect websites with Flash content: A user with the new IE (currently in beta) goes to your Flash enabled website. The new IE browser will prompt users if they want to use the Flash plugin. By prompting the user, Microsoft avoids the Eolas patent.
This would only happen on new browsers entering pages with the current embedding of Flash movies. To avoid this annoying prompt, there is an alternative to plugins called Active Content. The changes to Internet Explorer will take effect early next year, says Microsoft.

Active Content will replace the current model for embedding plugins and applets and allows for Flash playback without any prompts. Paul Betlem has written an indepth article detailing the changes. The article can be found in the new Active Content Developer Center at macromedia.com.
Visit Active Content Developer Center

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