A jury rejects Michael Doyle his patents on the internet

A U.S. company has forced the father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, to appear before a Texas court to defend an “interactive website” without any ownership and reject the claims of the company that stated to be in possession of a patent on the website that allowed them to collect remittance from any company that uses this technology. That is, nearly all the Internet. Last night, however, and with an unprecedented speed, eight jury members declared the patents invalid and closed a waged a battle over the Internet architecture.

The company Eolas Technologies is however, well known in U.S. courts for their patent litigation. It is considered a patent troll and it does not use its proprietary to create products and is dedicated to pursuing third parties for the make and licensing.

Ganó had a similar case with Microsoft for the use of certain programs in Internet Explorer. MS was ordered to pay $500 Million, but the matter ended with a settlement on unknown amount.

Eolas founder Michael Doyle, along with two researchers, had a patent on the viewing of videos without downloading, search suggestions, and other “interactive elements” of the website. The patented company said it allows a person, connected to an open hypermedia system, to access and run a program embedded in it. This literature authorized him to go to court to demand payment for the alleged license infringement. Eolas claimed more than $600 Million to large Internet companies. Their victory would have a devastating effect. In the United States accepted software patents is taken more seriously as compared to Europe.

Berners-Lee criticized the claims and the patent system in the U.S. and described it as the greatest threat of the Internet today. The father of the web described the beginnings of it as a time when researchers were not after money. He highlighted Pei-Yuan Wei, creator of the graphics-based browser Viola, who was never patented before Eolas alleged invention.

Michael Doyle claimed that in 1993, from the University of California, he created a system that allowed doctors to see the nascent embryos on www. It was claimed, the first program that allowed users to interact with images in a browser window.

It is not the first time that Berners-Lee is facing Eolas. In 2003, in regard to the litigation against Microsoft, Berners-Lee sent a letter to the U.S. Patent Office to reconsider its decision to admit the claims of Eolas.

Berners-Lee, apart from denying that the system of external files within the website was originally patented by Eolas, warned the courts of dire consequences. Berners-Lee said in his letter that assuming the patent valid would require incurring an untold number of page authors and programmers “who, themselves, have not infringed any patent.”

Moreover, if one decides to pay for the license of Eolas technology will result in fragmentation of the standards on which the network works and ensures its interoperability. Another dramatic consequence would be that hundreds of thousands of useless sites on the Web are without the author’s updates.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Feb 11 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.