Re: Eolas Patent Opposition Revealed

The links to the PTO submissions cited by TheoDP all come from a very  
useful piece by Dale Dougherty, in which Dale explains:

> The basic premise of Eolas’ written response is that browser  
> developers working in 1993 and 1994 did not consider embedding  
> interactive applications in the browser window and that the browser  
> simply rendered static information. Felten makes the statement that  
> Berners-Lee’s HTML specification “teaches away from the provision of  
> rich interactivity in the browser.” Felten says that “Berners-Lee  
> teaches a language for authoring Web pages but it does not teach how  
> to build a browser or how a browser works.” Those statements are  
> completely inconsistent with Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web.  
> Berners-Lee talked about browsers that were equally capable of reading  
> and writing, which goes back to Ted Nelson’s definition of hypertext  
> as non-linear writing. In his book, “Weaving the Web,” Berners-Lee  
> uses the phrase “browser/editor” to refer to the kind of client  
> application he envisioned as a Web browser. He writes about his own  
> prototyping of the first Web client, which he said was “basically like  
> a word processor”: “By mid-November I had a point-and-click  
> browser/editor which I called WorldWideWeb.” He goes on to say that  
> “the browser would decode URIs, and let me read, write or edit Web  
> pages in HTML.” This reflects the spirit of early Web development, as  
> I recall hearing it first-hand. (Today’s wikis and weblogs seem to  
> close to realizing this vision.)

The rest of the story is at

	http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4994

I encourage those interested in the substance of this matter to have a  
look.

Danny

On Jun 5, 2004, at 6:31 PM, TheoDP@aol.com wrote:

>
> While news accounts credited Tim Berners-Lee's mighty pen with  
> triggering the USPTO
> reexam of the Eolas plug-in patent that could negate a $520+ million  
> judgment against
> Microsoft, newly released USPTO interview notes suggest the reexam may  
> owe more to an
> alliance of tech giants who appear to have quietly advanced the same  
> arguments to the
> USPTO weeks prior to Berners-Lee. According to a 4-27 Interview  
> Summary, the USPTO
> presented Eolas with a 10-14 letter signed by in-house counsel from  
> Microsoft, AOL and
> Macromedia, a 10-15 letter from Adobe, and a 10-22 letter from the law  
> firm of Sidley Austin
> (aka Microsoft's lawyers) in connection with its proposed rejection of  
> Eolas' patent claims.
> All predated the 10-24 letter from the W3C's counsel as well as  
> Berners-Lee's
> widely-publicized 10-28 letter, which seems unlikely to have prompted  
> the USPTO's detailed
> 10-30 Reexam Order. The W3C has repeatedly had no comment when asked  
> if the 'newly
> cited art' provided in its 10-24 filing had already been supplied  
> earlier to the USPTO by
> others.
>
> Links at:
> http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/ 
> 010459.shtml#010459
>

btw - I was confused at first by the presence of this link. I thought  
that the text TheoDP sent was from Dan Gillmor, distinguished columnist  
and blogger from the San Jose Mercury News. Actually, the text in  
Gillmor's blog is from TheoDP originally, so it's TheoDP's for a second  
time, not Gillmor's.
--
Daniel J. Weitzner                                           
+1.617.253.8036 (MIT)
World Wide Web Consortium                       +1.202.364.4750 (DC)
Technology & Society Domain Leader      <djweitzner@w3.org>
http://www.w3.org/People/Weitzner.html

Received on Sunday, 6 June 2004 20:50:09 UTC