The Web’s longest nightmare ends: Eolas patents are dead on appeal | Hacker News Reader

The Web’s longest nightmare ends: Eolas patents are dead on appeal

arstechnica.com

138 pointseksith50 comments

> VPlot and Viola were demonstrated to Sun Microsystems in May 1993, months before Doyle claimed to have conceived of his invention.

If you think that it makes sense to give the first person to come up with an idea exclusive rights over it for 20 years, compare the amount of innovation supplied to the world in having the idea of putting something interactive on the Web to the amount of innovation that has been built on interactivity on the Web (and yes, the patent is very close to that broad). The former is hardly trivial - it was a novel idea and would have been a very cool demo at the time - but the latter is half of the technology industry. Consider the tens of millions of dollars Eolas was able to extract from random companies while doing nothing, and how much more they might have gained if they had happened to have been a few months earlier. Consider the stupid hack required for years to work around the patent in IE - it could have been worse, since this patent was broad enough that nobody was going to stop innovating because of it yet not broad enough to lack a simple workaround, but it was still stupid.

I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

The lawyers. Hence...

And the crybabies that think that all they do is a unique invention and that it costs millions of dollars to write a couple of lines of code

> And the crybabies that think that all they do is a unique invention and that it costs millions of dollars to write a couple of lines of code

I think that is a great point. I believe that many people think that you should get a patent for something if you thought of something first. It certainly has an appeal towards the common man if you can get rewarded for just an idea. As IT professionals we all know someone who has an idea and just needs someone to execute.

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Patent trolls and lawyers.

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Why limit it to software?

Just because one aspect of the patent system has been abused and applied incorrectly doesn't mean that it's an invalid system. There's a great deal of benefit to the patent system if it is applied correctly.

In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not? What benefit do you believe that patents bring to other fields? Is there some other way that we could get the same (or better) benefit in those fields?

> In what way do you think that patents are broken such that applying them to one field of human invention works, but applying them to another does not?

Different fields of human invention have different economic characteristics. For a field where patents may be more economically useful than they are in software, consider the pharmaceutical industry. Developing a new drug costs a decade and hundreds of millions, and remains useful for a long time, but once developed is easily copied. None of those conditions are true for software (and there is no equivalent of copyright protection for drugs).

For more, try http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/09/do-patent-and-copy...

Pharmaceuticals are a poor example because the (bulk of the) costs aren’t inherent to the discovery process, rather they are caused by the regulatory process that ensure safety for patients. I don’t see a good reason why that same regulatory process shouldn’t grant a limited monopoly instead of depending on patent protection.

> I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Let's add business methods and existing genetic sequences (thankfully that one has been partially corrected) to the list.

At the very least, one should have to demonstrate economic damages arising from the violation.

If I'm a glass company that spent time and money developing a revolutionary new compound to strengthen glass and my sales are being impacted by someone who copied the compound, then it seems reasonable that I should have some protection.

But if I developed it and then sat on it, I should have zero ability to claim anything.

>I have a hard time seeing who would be harmed if software patents were categorically invalid.

Companies that have spent billions on defensive patent portfolios, like Google.

Though, ultimately they might still come out ahead, depending on their ongoing patent litigation costs.

that's a bit like saying we may as well have a war, we've spent so much on all this military hardware ... ;-)

"Appeals ensued but were inconclusive; the case ultimately settled out for more than $100 million, with just over $30 million going to Eolas' co-plaintiff, the University of California."

It's pretty depressing that taxpayer-funded universities are also in the patent troll business.

It was testimony from the said taxpayer-funded university that killed the patent.

"While UC lawyers cooperated with the plaintiffs, two UC Berkeley-trained computer scientists were key witnesses in the effort to demolish the Eolas patents."

I took that to mean the testimony was from people who had studied at the university, not the university itself.

Perhaps the idea that research facilities could become self-funding via IP was well-intentioned, but I agree that it was (is) ultimately counter-productive. It is counter-productive in several ways, including discouraging free scientific communication, creating barriers to entry, and establishing a tragedy of the anti-commons, ...

>It was the culmination of a bold campaign by a man named Michael Doyle to levy a vast patent tax on the modern web.

It wasn't a bold campaign, the man's a coward and a piece of shit. He should be going to prison for trying to extort billions of dollars from technology companies.

Yes, he is a scumbag and what he did was unethical and still perfectly legal. We have to remember that before reaching for the lock and key.

I doubt RICO would stick or even blackmail or extortion. What would be the charge against him? Maybe there's some tax dodging going on, but something tells me he's been careful.

Being a scumbag, unfortunately, isn't enough to land someone in prison so that would leave other legal avenues to make future scumbaggery less profitable.

What, exactly, is cowardly about him? If anything, he seems like a bold piece of shit rather than a cowardly one.

Coward seems to be in the bag of words people reach for when trying to say someone is really, really bad.

He should be made to pay treble damages to anyone he successfully extorted money from, too.

I've interacted with Mike a few times via the Tcl newsgroup, and he seems like an alright person in general. I think a lot of people, when presented with an opportunity to go for zillions of dollars would take it.

That does not mean I approve of his actions, but I think we can discuss them and the patent system without resorting to name calling, no?

I've interacted with Mike a few times via the Tcl newsgroup, and he seems like an alright person in general.

While you may not approve of his actions, you seem to be defending them because he acted like an "alright person" a couple of times in a newsgroup. You're acting like he saw someone drop a $20 on the ground and took it for himself.

I think a lot of people, when presented with an opportunity to go for zillions of dollars would take it.

Well, yes, patent trolls are pretty common nowadays. This doesn't make their actions less terrible.

Let's try again:

"That does not mean I approve of his actions"

I am against software patents and do not think he's doing something that makes the world a better place.

My point is merely that he's a human being who did something I don't like and not some evil monster. Sorry if that offends your sense of outrage.

"The company relocated to East Texas...."

This, I gather, was a mistake.

While the East Texas "Rocket Docket" gained notoriety early on (and probably for some time), I've read recently that due to all the patent lawsuits they've been handling they've learned what it's all about and are no longer so plaintiff friendly. I suppose the bad press had an effect as well.

Better late than never, I suppose.

I hope the Texans have enough pride in their community to pursue ethical processes toward business advancement. Patent trolls are business poison, but casual disregard for people is community poison. There's no reason ethics should get in the way of profits.

Patent judges are federal judges, appointed by the President. The opinions of Texans at large are likely not very important.

But surely they pay some attention to community sentiment.

There are some jerks behind the bench, I'm sure, but I like to think the majority are willing to serve their community objectively (or the legal system has no hope) and that would entail not screwing the very people he's appointed to serve.

Government serves the people, not the other way around.

If they are not from the area or a similar area and are climbing the federal court ladder, the majority seem to give not a care what the locals think. The locals are not the ones they need to impress.

But a lot of these are jury trials, aren't they?

Including this one, which is why I brought up this point in the discussion.

Here an East Texas jury looked at the facts etc. as portrayed by both sides, the law as instructed by the judge, and delivered the "right" verdict, which happened to be against the plaintiff.

Article says judgement was delivered by jury. This gives whole another angle to East Texas thing. Let's say you are town. Your major business is lawsuits, specifically, lawsuits from patent trolls. You are able to pay your bills because all these trolls descend in to your town feeling lucky and throw all these money to keep tour town prospered. How much jury selected from this town would be inclined to give judgments in plaintiff's favor?

A lot of it is probably that, simply on the merits, the average infringement case is a lot weaker than it was before the patent troll business model became popular.

Exactly. The district has built an industry around patent litigation, pro and con. I'm not sure where, but a patent lawyer made the comment on the forum. That if you're a defendant you want it to be East Texas. You can take your chances with 6 jurors who are familiar with patent law. Any other district you'd have 6 randomly selected people that probably don't know much on patents.

In 1999 I was deposed by the firm going after Microsoft. I had driven the design & implementation of the <object> tag in IE3, which was central to their case.

Coincidentally, and ironically, it turned out my then-soon-to-be, but now-ex, brother-in-law was a lawyer at that firm (or a related one, it was never clear). He called in rich a few years later.

Lesson to all Patent Trolls - 20 years of suppressing innovation and generating no value can result in you being millions of dollars richer.

Do not negotiate with Terrorists, do not feed wolves, do not pay patent trolls.

Remember click to activate in Internet Explorer caused by Eolas?

I'm sort of amused by how at the time people thought it was awful, but it wasn't all that much later that click-to-play for Flash became a moderately popular feature.

Of course, these two features are completely different.

Except that the flash stuff still loaded with the eolas mod, it just didn't respond to the first mouse click.

You know what is weird is that all these patent trolls are scaring me into filing for defensive patents. Its scary since the law has now changed from "First to invent" to "First to file". You come up with a great idea, troll X notices it, files for patents and then sues you back.

You could still claim prior art if you used or published the idea before they patented it. The difference between "first to invent" and "first to file" basically only comes up when someone invents an idea but keeps it private, which can be difficult to prove anyway. (IANAL, TINLA.)

"First to file" just means that if two inventors file, then the first one to file gets the patent (rather than them having to compare notebooks, and other evidence). It does nothing to stop publicly available prior art invalidating patents.

Patents are like nukes. The only "defense" they grant is mutually assured destruction. With trolls, there is no other "company" to destroy, as they make nothing but lawsuits. Add this to the fact that the patent office is so screwed up that they're granting patents on the same "technology" over and over again to different applicants and you get:

tl;dr : There's no such thing as a "defensive" patent. Patents don't make peace. They don't even make war. They just make destruction.

It's tempting to set up something like halfbakery to generate a lot of ideas to create prior-art now, to help the future people later.

(http://www.halfbakery.com/)

I think we should have less patents and more sharing. Most inventions derive some knowledge from previous inventors, thus we are standing on the shoulder of giants. Thus why should someone have the right to patent code?

In other domains, this is supposed to be one of the reasons patents are a good thing, companies disclose their knowledge in return for a 20 year monopoly after the date of filing. Otherwise they'd try to keep this info as a trade secret for an indefinite period of time.

Some times it works well, some times it doesn't, e.g. steam engines are said to be a classic example of the latter, sinstering 3D printers might be another example of the latter. I believe it works well in the chemical realm, and to my knowledge it didn't harm the quick development of integrated circuits.

Because there are so many "inventions" in any one piece of software, as a practical matter it doesn't seem like it's a good field to allow patents.

In most places, the players know not to be pains and patent licensing works fairly well (pool patents, spec, standard, small fee). Software has a problem[1] because many don't make money off the software and instead make money off other means. There is not a nicely understood product to pay with. Where we see it all go bad (e.g. medicine), it has a lot to do with the rules of the systems (e.g. clinical trials) or just plain stupidity (e.g. 3D printing).

If h.264 licensing had just been from hardware accelerators and not software implementation / content, then no fuss would have been raised. I so hoped they would see the light with h.265.

1) well, other than the stupidity of patenting business processes as if they are some technical invention

I'm surprised there's people in East Texas district that has not served on a jury trial for patent infringement.

Always that district court. It's obvious the court there is part of the problem.

Would that Doyle had patented browser URL history spamming instead, and saved us all from arstechnica's assualt on our browser history list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com