Eolas Patent Taken Away

from the phew dept

The patent office finally got one right (though, it took quite a while). Despite tons of prior art, and a patent that was far from "non-obvious", Eolas convinced a judge to award them over half a billion dollars from Microsoft for using embedded applications within IE. Microsoft started talking about changing the browser in a way that would have broken many web sites. After quite a bit of outcry from many different places, the patent office finally agreed to review the patent, and on second thought, are now rejecting the Eolas patent. Did it really need to take this much time, this many lawyers and this much outcry just to get a single bad patent reviewed and rejected? Isn't it about time we fixed the patent system?
Hide this

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.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    digibum, 5 Mar 2004 @ 4:58pm

    But the real question is . . .

    if you had a patent should it be easy for others to challenge it? Of course we want bad patents easy to overturn and good patents to be difficult to challenge. :-)

    I think more work should be done on preventing patents from being issued for these kinds of things in the first place.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      rainblk, 6 Mar 2004 @ 4:26am

      Re: But the real question is . . .

      Actually, a fast track patent challange system is not a bad idea. It is very possible a market based solution could be more effective in determing idea originality, and establishing timing, in the long run. The alternative is leaving the system in the hands of an Agency making highly impactive decisions in an unbalanced manner, as it is now.

      link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.