Eolas v. Microsoft

Here are some links concerning the Eolas v. Microsoft case. Eolas sued
Microsoft for patent infringement and was recently awarded $521 million.
Eolas appears to have a patent on the idea of embedding objects (in certain
ways, I presume) in HTML documents. This outcome of this case apparently has
the potential to make Microsoft alter IE so that it does not infringe on the
patent, though whether this will happen remains to be seen. This could well
affect all HTML pages where things like Flash and Shockwave and other
plugins are embedded. I just read of this today, first I've heard about it.
Anybody been following this and know about it in some detail?
http://www.lexisone.com/news/nlibrary/m081203e.html
http://www.w3.org/2003/08/patent
http://www.ucop.edu/news/archives/2003/aug11art1.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/legal/other/08-11-03EolasStatement.asp

Here is some writing from 1998 about this issue (it has been brewing a long
time):

"On November 17th [1998], little Eolas came into effective control of U.S.
patent number 5,838,906 for an invention described as "a distributed
hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing
interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document."
Say that fast three times. The patent is held by The University of
California in the name of inventors Michael Doyle, David Martin and Cheong
Ang. Doyle is the CEO of Eolas, which is the exclusive licensee of the
patent.

Read the patent, and you'll see it covers the use of embedded program
objects, or applets within Web documents. The patent also covers the use of
any algorithm that implements dynamic, bi-directional communications between
Web browsers and external applications. Every Web browser you can name
currently supports embedded applets, and is therefore in violation of the
Eolas patent. But wait, there's more! The Eolas patent covers the whole
concept of executable content, which is at the very foundation of Java. So
it looks like Java, too, is in violation of the patent. For that matter, so
is Microsoft's Internet Explorer and ActiveX.

The patent stems from work done in 1993 by Doyle and Co. at the University
of California at San Francisco, where they built an interactive 3-D medical
visualization. These guys showed working applets and plug-ins in their
enhanced version of Mosaic to NCSA, Microsoft and Sun a couple of years
before any similar products like Navigator 2.0 or Java appeared on the
market. It's not like these outfits can claim to have developed their
products ignorant of Eolas' work.

What does this have to do with the various Microsoft legal cases?

In the case of Sun versus Microsoft, it looks like Eolas is in a position to
put Java out of business, if it likes, not to mention big parts of Netscape
and AOL."

This is from http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19981203.html