Tim Berners-Lee Demonstrates Prior Art Against Eolas Patent
from the show-'em dept
Continuing the good fight against silly patents, Tim Berners-Lee has sent a long letter to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office detailing examples of prior art on how to embed a program within a browser. The letter asks the USPTO to invalidate the Eolas patent - which Eolas is using to hold Microsoft hostage. There seems to be a ton of prior art, and it's hardly "non-obvious" to embed one program within another. This whole mess just demonstrates some of the problems with software patents, and companies that use them to restrict, rather than encourage, innovation.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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http://nip.blogs.com/patent/2004/11/cloak_and_dagge.html
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