Toolkit

Story: Eolas patent ruled invalid

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To the guy who said it is not a valid patent. PLEASE substantiate your claim. I am sick and tired of seeing these "not valid patent" posts by people on slashdot and everywhere as if you guys are IP experts.

I took a look at the patent and it is indeed a valid patent. The specifications not only provided a means to develop the patent, they even included pieces of code in the Appendix to show how you can modify Mosaic. Sure everyone now has a Flash plugin, but this patent was filed in 1994 before such plugins were ever in use. As far as I am concerned, the patent provided ample "novelness" and "usefulness" to be considered a valid patent. This is in stark contrast to Amazon's really trivial "One Click" Patent which IMHO was a joke.

The issue about the patent is "prior art". DID there exist anything similar enough out there to warrant this patent? The funny thing is yes and no. Many people cite Pei's Viola browser and Raggett's statements on the newsgroups as prior art.... but for some reason the judge threw them out! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EOLAS).. Note the Viola and Raggett's statements were only considered by the judge but not the jury (Judge threw it out).

IMHO after reading through Raggett's June 93 post on HTML+, that there is a ground for obviousness as HTML+ did propose and "embed" tag that functions quite similar to the Eolas patent... although the descriptions were extremely brief.

If the USPTO considers Raggetts post as "prior art" the Eolas patent is finished... there's still this element of "interactivity" as claimed by the Eolas patent that isn't properly addressed by Raggett, which may still give the Eolas patent some room, but Raggetts statements comes really close to putting a death nail on the patent.

To all the "anti-patent" posters on the web, when you post such comments make a freakin effort to UNDERSTAND what intellectual property protection is before you fire off your tirades.

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