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Filed under: Business, Developer, Web services, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, web 2.0

Eolas v. Everyone you've ever heard of


Tireless patent troll Intellectual Property holder Eolas has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against, well.. nearly everyone. The issue at hand deals with two patents in Eolas' possession -- the first of which was the subject of a successful lawsuit against Microsoft back in 2004.

The second patent, what Eolas refers to as "a continuation of the '906 patent" claims to hold as the sole intellectual property of Eolas, "fully-interactive embedded applications [...] through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques." The second patent is so far untested in court -- and ostensibly covers more popular websites than you can shake a knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag at.

I haven't had time to delve into the language of the patent, but this reeks of utter nonsense to me so far. In my layman's oppinion, Eolas may have made a crucial mistake however, taking aim at so many large targets at once -- with one untested patent, and another which Microsoft already came rather close to beating.

Take the leap to read the whole extortion demand press release, and see the enormous list of publicly traded web firms included.

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Filed under: Developer, Internet, News, Windows, Microsoft

IE6 ActiveX changes today

eolas patentWhat a long, boring, and annoying trip it's been. For those who don't remember, way back in 1999 a little Chicago company called Eolas sued Microsoft for infringing on their patents regarding embedded content in a browser. Whoopdidoo, right? Microsoft, however, could not crush the little company. So, sparing the gory details reversals and counter-reversals, MS is now required to make changes to IE that will handle stuff like QuickTime, Real media, Flash, Java— you know, the kinds of things you use every flippin' day. MS still has to pony up some $560 million now, and it looks like the changes, starting today from a place in the MS Download Center, will gradually appease the "David"s from Eolas (as opposed to the Goliaths at MS). Unfortunately, this is a situation where the consumer may lose. If changes disrupt the browsing experience, it will make it difficult for web developers to do business as usual. In fact, this update will mean users have to click one more time to initiate ActiveX controls. Luckily, MS has a handy page on MSDN for developers, and how they can work around this in their pages. Either way, I'm still strongly against our current software patent system. While Microsoft should have paid something, I don't think that every web surfer or web developer should be punished, years later, for something so basic to the browsing experience.

[Via BetaNews]

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