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Information may change rapidly as the event progresses. | Eolas (an acronym for Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems, and Irish for "knowledge") is a United States company, and patent troll. It was founded in 1994 by Dr. Michael David Doyle. His UCSF team has claimed to have created the first web browser that supported plugins. They demonstrated it at Xerox PARC, in November 1993, at the second Bay Area SIGWEB meeting. The claim has been contested by Pei-Yuan Wei, developer of the earlier Viola browser, a claim supported by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and other Web developers. Image File history File links Current_event_marker. ...
For other uses, see Patent (disambiguation). ...
Year 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full 1994 Gregorian calendar). ...
UCSF in 1908, with the streetcar that used to run on Parnassus Avenue The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is one of the worlds leading centers of health sciences research, patient care, and education. ...
An example of a web browser (Internet Explorer), displaying the English Wikipedia main page. ...
A plugin (plug-in, addin, add-in, addon or add-on) is a computer program that interacts with a main (or host) application (a web browser or an email program, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function on demand. ...
Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) (name pronounced ) is a global document management company, which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies. ...
Bold text // Headline text Link title This article is about the computer research center. ...
The Bay Area SIGWEB was a special interest group for the World Wide Web that was founded in August 1993 by the staff of the UCSF Center for Knowledge Management (CKM) [1], at the direction of CKM Director Dr. Michael Doyle, who later became the founder of Eolas. ...
Pei-Yuan Wei (魏培源, pinyin: Wèi Péiyuán) is a former undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley who created ViolaWWW, one of the first graphical web browsers. ...
ViolaWWW was one of the first graphically-based web browsers. ...
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Sir Tim (Timothy John) Berners-Lee, KBE (TimBL or TBL) (b. ...
The patent
Patent 5,838,906, titled "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document," was filed on October 17, 1994 and granted on November 17, 1998. is the 290th day of the year (291st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full 1994 Gregorian calendar). ...
17 November is also the name of a Marxist group in Greece, coinciding with the anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic uprising. ...
Year 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar). ...
In Autumn 2003, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the Director of the W3 Consortium Tim Berners-Lee wrote to Under Secretary of Commerce, asking to invalidate this patent, in order to "eliminate this major impediment to the operation of the Web". Leaders of Open Source Community sided with Microsoft in fighting the patent due to its threat to the free nature of the Web and to the basic established HTML standards. The specific concerns of having one company (Eolas) controlling a critical piece of the Web framework were cited. It has been suggested that W3C Markup Validation Service be merged into this article or section. ...
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Sir Tim (Timothy John) Berners-Lee, KBE (TimBL or TBL) (b. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. ...
In March 2004, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) re-examined and initially rejected the patent. Eolas submitted a rebuttal in May 2004. On September 27, 2005, the USPTO upheld the validity of the patent. The PTO ruling rejected the relevance of Pei Wei's Viola code to the Eolas patent. According to the University of California press release, "In its 'Reasons for Patentability/Confirmation' notice, the patent examiner rejected the arguments for voiding UC's previously approved patent claims for the Web-browser technology as well as the evidence presented to suggest that the technology had been developed prior to the UC innovation. The examiner considered the Viola reference the primary reference asserted by Microsoft at trial as a prior art publication and found that Viola does 'not teach nor fairly suggest that instant 906 invention, as claimed. [1] PTO headquarters in Alexandria The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or USPTO) is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that provides patent and trademark protection to inventors and businesses for their inventions and corporate and product identification. ...
is the 270th day of the year (271st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Year 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Litigation Microsoft declined to license the technology when it was offered to them (and others) in 1994. [2] Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ...
In 1999 Eolas filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against Microsoft over validity and use of the patent. Eolas won the initial case in August 2003 and was awarded damages of $521m from Microsoft for infringement. The District Court reaffirmed its decision in January 2004.
In June 2004 Microsoft appealed the case to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In March 2005 the District Court judgment was remanded, but the infringement and damages parts of the case were upheld. The appeals court ruled that the two Viola-related exhibits that had been thrown out of the original trial needed to be shown to a jury in a retrial. Microsoft quickly filed for a rehearing. A prisoner who is denied, refused or unable to meet the conditions of bail, or who is unable to post bail, may be held in a prison on remand until their criminal trial. ...
In October 2005, The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear Microsoft's appeal, leaving intact the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of Eolas with respect to foreign sales of Microsoft Windows. However, the remand to District Court has not been heard yet.
In May 2007 the USPTO agreed to allow Microsoft to argue ownership of the patent after they reissued a Microsoft patent that covers the same concepts as outlined in the Eolas patent, and contains wording that mirrors the Eolas patent. [3] [4]
Browser changes In February 2006, Microsoft modified its Internet Explorer web browser to side-step the Eolas patent. The change, first discussed in 2003 [5], requires users to click once on an ActiveX control to "activate" it before they can use its interface. Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer, abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of proprietary graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. ...
In June 2006, Opera Software released version 9 of its Opera browser for Windows and other operating systems, with modifications similar to Microsoft's. Logo of Opera Software. ...
Opera is an Internet suite which handles common internet-related tasks, including visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, and online chat. ...
Other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari might have to implement a similar change to avoid infringement, or to license Eolas' patent. Dr. Doyle has stated that Eolas would offer royalty-free licenses to non-commercial entities. A statement on Eolas' web site clarifies the company's policy with regard to such licenses. [6] Eolas has not yet indicated intent to pursue further cases [7]. As of 2007, no Eolas' license has been granted to the leading open-source browser, Mozilla Firefox. Eolas itself never made a popular web-browser product utilizing its patent, which led many to use it as an example of a patent troll. Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and a large community of external contributors. ...
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. ...
Mozilla Firefox is a graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation, and a large community of external contributors. ...
Patent troll is a pejorative term used for a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a matter considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic (see List of patent trolls for examples). ...
Workarounds Microsoft's decision to change its browser, rather than to license the patent, forced a disruption in the normal functioning of millions of existing web pages that used interactive plug-ins. However, a number of workarounds were devised by web developers to avoid users having to perform an extra click.
For instance, one workaround is to load in the HTML element containing the plugin from an external JavaScript file, rather than embedding it on the page. In this situation, Internet Explorer does not ask the user for an "activation" click because the patent does not cover embedded scripting. In computing, an HTML element indicates structure in an HTML document and a way of hierarchically arranging content. ...
It has been suggested that Client-side JavaScript be merged into this article or section. ...
See also Software patent does not have a universally accepted definition. ...
Notable software patents include: RSA Patent - a famous software patent on the ground-breaking and highly unobvious algorithm for public key encryption, widely used for secure communications in many industries nowdays (RSA) Karmarkar Patent - a famous software patent on the highly non-trivial mathematical algorithm for solving linear programming problems...
Intellectual Ventures is a private company founded in 2000 to invest in pure invention. ...
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