When the Department of Justice hauled Microsoft into court on antitrust charges in 1998, Silicon Valley was awash in schadenfreude.
For years, Microsoft's Windows desktop monopoly had inspired equal doses of fear and distrust. Now it was time for payback, courtesy of Uncle Sam and your hard-earned taxpayer dollars at work. But all it took was a heretofore obscure patent to ignite a controversy to turn Microsoft into the people's choice.
In August, a federal jury ordered the software maker to pay $521m to Michael Doyle, the founder of Eolas Technologies, for infringing upon a patent he was granted while working as a researcher at the University of California. The patent describes how a browser opens external applications produced by software providers.
Microsoft, which lost its first post-trial attempt to challenge the decision, plans to fight the verdict. In the meantime, the company is going to tweak its Internet Explorer Web browser to comply with the court decision.
But as computer industry executives pondered the business ramifications of the Eolas verdict, they began to get a cold sweat over the prospect of millions of Web pages -- as well as products of independent software developers -- winding up being made incompatible with Microsoft's Internet browser.
Prominent among those giving voice to this worry is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which earlier in the week urged US Patent and Trademark Office boss James Rogan to invalidate the Eolas patent. Arguing that the patent "will cause cascades of incompatibility to ripple through the Web," W3C director Tim Berners-Lee warned that Web browser developers would also be forced to pay to retrofit their own pages and software applications -- even though they were not guilty of any infringement violation.
