Microsoft fired another shot in its defense of the patent infringement suit brought by Eolas Technologies, asking the U.S. District Court to overturn a Federal Court ruling.
Microsoft has lost twice in the suit, once in a jury trial and once on appeal. Now, it’s asked the U.S. District court to overturn the $521 million
judgment and injunction against distribution of its Internet Explorer
browser.
Eolas, a spin-off from the University of California, sued Microsoft in
February, 1999 for patent infringement related to the way the Internet
Explorer browser handles media and plug-ins within Web pages.
Eolas’ patent No. 5,838,906 was granted on November 17, 1998. It covers
the technique of embedding small interactive programs, including plug-ins,
applets, scriptlets or ActiveX Controls, into Web pages.
In August 2003, a Chicago jury ordered
Microsoft to pay $521 million to the University of California and Eolas
Technology.
Microsoft appealed the ruling in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals,
where, in January, 2004, a Chicago federal court upheld the jury’s
decision, and piled on an injunction prohibiting further distribution of IE.
The injunction was stayed pending Microsoft’s appeal, filed June 3 2004.
After the January court defeat, Microsoft detailed how it would change
the IE browser so that it no longer infringed. Because Eolas’ patent covers
the automatic launch of applets and such, Microsoft said it would require
users to okay each launch.
But interactive advertisers who rely on multimedia and applications such
as Macromedia Flash feared that changing the browser would greatly reduce
the number of ad impressions, because users would often choose not to load
the ads. Microsoft quickly decided to wait until the appeal process was
completed before changing the browser.
Perhaps stirred by the outcry, the World Wide Web
Consortium, which oversees Web standards such as HTML and XML, asked the U.S. Patent Office to review the Eolas patent. In March, patent examiner
Andrew Caldwell rejected all
ten claims of the Eolas patent, in light of prior art submitted by the W3C,
including the draft specifications for Hypertext Markup Language published
in June 1993and a post to an Internet news group around that time.
Eolas appealed the USPTO decision, as part of what’s known as “patent
prosecution,” a process to determine whether the patent should stand. Eolas
has the right to take its case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Patent prosecution
can be a process as lengthy as the appeal of a patent infringement case. Experts say this may be a long, slow race.
