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RE: Federal Court says Microsoft infringed UC, Eolas Web Objec

• To: 'Jonathan Robie' <jonathan.robie@d...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Federal Court says Microsoft infringed UC, Eolas Web Objects Patent
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 08:39:23 -0500

Yes.  This is the patent I mentioned to Dare.  Some articles I've 
read state that this does cover most if not all of the commercial 
web browsers.  

So, how many don't want a royalty-free standard for the web 
browser?  The problem of hidden patents can't hide forever from 
standardization where a call for known patents is issued to any 
and all concerned.  The legal process must be ammended to enable 
such a call to prevent hidden patents, and hidden patents must 
be treated by the same means (emminent domain) that enable 
communities to take ownership of necessary properties.  This 
would be a bold step but necessary.  The concepts of essential 
facilities and emminent domain are related.  The task is for 
the international legal and treaty communities to create a 
framework for handling these issues in the context of royalty 
free international standards to which the signatories are the 
nation states, not the IP owners.

len

From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@d...]

Eolas and the University of California claimed that Microsoft infringed 
U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906, and the federal court agreed. If I am reading it 
correctly, which may not be the case, this patent seems to cover all 
embedded objects in web browsers that get their data from other programs 
over the Internet. That describes the architecture of a lot of web pages!

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