Eolas
Encyclopedia
Eolas is a United States
technology company. It was founded in 1994 by sole employee Michael David Doyle. His University of California, San Francisco
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 that this was an innovation has been contested since it was used to justify their patent by Pei-Yuan Wei
, who developed the earlier Viola browser
, which added plugin capabilities in 1992, a claim supported by inventor of the WWW Sir Tim Berners-Lee
and other Web pioneers. Given only a short time to prepare, Wei was only able to demonstrate Viola's equivalent capabilities for local rather than remote files at the 2003 Eolas v. Microsoft trial, and thus fell short of proving prior art
to the court's satisfaction. The case with Microsoft over patent 5,838,906 was settled in 2007 for a confidential amount of money after an initial $565 million judgment was stayed on appeal, but the University of California, disclosed its piece of the final settlement as $30.4 million. In 2009 Eolas sued numerous other companies over patent number 7,599,985 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas
. As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments
, Oracle
and JPMorgan Chase that have signed licensing deals with Eolas, while others are still litigating.
that implemented plugins, client-side image maps, and web-page-defined browser buttons and menus. In 2005, Doyle released 'Muze', a "multimedia doodling application".
In Autumn 2003, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the Director of the W3C
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.
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.'"
Eolas was granted a second patent in October 2009 related to the same technology.
declined to license the technology when it was offered to them (and others) in 1994.
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 $ from Microsoft for infringement. The District Court reaffirmed the jury's 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.
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 had 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.
The USPTO ruled in favor of Eolas on that matter in September 2007.
Microsoft and Eolas agreed in July 2007 to delay a pending re-trial, in order to negotiate a settlement. On August 27, 2007, Eolas reported to its shareholders that a settlement had been reached and that Eolas expected to pay a substantial dividend as a result; the exact amount and terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
In October 2009, Eolas sued a number of large corporations for infringement of the same patent. The sued corporations include Adobe, Amazon.com, Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, CDW Corp., Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, The Go Daddy Group, Google, J.C. Penney Co. Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., New Frontier Media Inc., Office Depot Inc., Perot Systems Corp., Playboy Enterprises International Inc., Rent-A-Center Inc., Staples Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and YouTube LLC. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in Computerworld
's opinion section, called Eolas a patent troll
after these lawsuits were initiated. As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments
, Oracle
and JPMorgan Chase that have signed licensing deals with Eolas, while others are still litigating.
web browser to appear to side-step the Eolas patent. The change, first discussed in 2003,
requires users to click once on an ActiveX control to "activate" it before they can use its interface. The specific message is "Click to activate this control", shown as a tooltip when the cursor is held over the embedded object. However, following a November 2007 announcement that Microsoft had "licensed the technologies from Eolas",
in April 2008, Microsoft released an update which removed the click-to-activate functionality, reverting the software to its original design.
In June 2006, Opera Software
released version 9 of its Opera
browser for Windows and other operating systems, with modifications similar to Microsoft's.
Developers of other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox
and Apple's Safari
might feel obliged to either implement a similar change to attempt to avoid infringement or to license Eolas' patent. 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. , no Eolas license has been granted to the Mozilla Foundation
which develops the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser.
containing the plugin using JavaScript
, rather than embedding it on the page. In this situation, Internet Explorer did not ask the user for an "activation" click because the patent does not cover embedded scripting.
Opera
users can use User JavaScript functionality in the browser to workaround this issue with locally modified JavaScript.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
technology company. It was founded in 1994 by sole employee Michael David Doyle. His University of California, San Francisco
University of California, San Francisco
The University of California, San Francisco is one of the world's leading centers of health sciences research, patient care, and education. UCSF's medical, pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, and graduate schools are among the top health science professional schools in the world...
team has claimed to have created the first web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
that supported plugins. They demonstrated it at Xerox
Xerox
Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced 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...
PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
, in November 1993, at the second Bay Area SIGWEB
SIGWEB
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 University of California, San Francisco Center for Knowledge Management , at the direction of CKM Director Dr...
meeting. The claim that this was an innovation has been contested since it was used to justify their patent by Pei-Yuan Wei
Pei-Yuan Wei
Pei-Yuan Wei is the creator of ViolaWWW, the first popular graphical web browser.Pei-Yuan Wei was born in Taiwan. He graduated from Berkeley High School in 1986 and received his higher education at the University of California, Berkeley.-Controversy:...
, who developed the earlier Viola browser
ViolaWWW
ViolaWWW, first developed in the early 1990s, for Unix and the X Windowing System, was the first popular web browser which, until Mosaic, was the most frequently used web browser for access to the World Wide Web...
, which added plugin capabilities in 1992, a claim supported by inventor of the WWW Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
and other Web pioneers. Given only a short time to prepare, Wei was only able to demonstrate Viola's equivalent capabilities for local rather than remote files at the 2003 Eolas v. Microsoft trial, and thus fell short of proving prior art
Prior art
Prior art , in most systems of patent law, constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality...
to the court's satisfaction. The case with Microsoft over patent 5,838,906 was settled in 2007 for a confidential amount of money after an initial $565 million judgment was stayed on appeal, but the University of California, disclosed its piece of the final settlement as $30.4 million. In 2009 Eolas sued numerous other companies over patent number 7,599,985 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas
United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas
The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas is the Federal district court with jurisdiction over the eastern part of Texas and is a part of the Fifth Circuit. The court's headquarters are in Tyler, Texas and has five subdivision offices in Beaumont, Lufkin, Marshall,...
. As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...
, Oracle
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
and JPMorgan Chase that have signed licensing deals with Eolas, while others are still litigating.
Products
In September 1995, the founders of Eolas released WebRouser, a proof-of-concept browser based on MosaicMosaic
Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It may be a technique of decorative art, an aspect of interior decoration, or of cultural and spiritual significance as in a cathedral...
that implemented plugins, client-side image maps, and web-page-defined browser buttons and menus. In 2005, Doyle released 'Muze', a "multimedia doodling application".
Patents
US 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.In Autumn 2003, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the Director of the W3C
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web .Founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the...
Consortium Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
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
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
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
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
standards. The specific concerns of having one company (Eolas) controlling a critical piece of the Web framework were cited.
In March 2004, the United States Patent and Trademark Office
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification.The USPTO is based in Alexandria, Virginia,...
(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.'"
Eolas was granted a second patent in October 2009 related to the same technology.
Litigation
MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
declined to license the technology when it was offered to them (and others) in 1994.
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 $ from Microsoft for infringement. The District Court reaffirmed the jury's 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.
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 had 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.
The USPTO ruled in favor of Eolas on that matter in September 2007.
Microsoft and Eolas agreed in July 2007 to delay a pending re-trial, in order to negotiate a settlement. On August 27, 2007, Eolas reported to its shareholders that a settlement had been reached and that Eolas expected to pay a substantial dividend as a result; the exact amount and terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
In October 2009, Eolas sued a number of large corporations for infringement of the same patent. The sued corporations include Adobe, Amazon.com, Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, CDW Corp., Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, The Go Daddy Group, Google, J.C. Penney Co. Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., New Frontier Media Inc., Office Depot Inc., Perot Systems Corp., Playboy Enterprises International Inc., Rent-A-Center Inc., Staples Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Yahoo! Inc., and YouTube LLC. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing in Computerworld
Computerworld
Computerworld is an IT magazine that provides information for senior IT leaders. It is published in many countries around the world under the same or similar names. Its publisher is International Data Group. Computerworld serves the needs of IT management via print and online...
's opinion section, called Eolas a patent troll
Patent troll
Patent troll is a pejorative but questioned term used for a person or company who is a non-practicing inventor, and buys and enforces patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered by the target or observers as unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to...
after these lawsuits were initiated. As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...
, Oracle
Oracle
In Classical Antiquity, an oracle was a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic predictions or precognition of the future, inspired by the gods. As such it is a form of divination....
and JPMorgan Chase that have signed licensing deals with Eolas, while others are still litigating.
Effects on other browsers
In February 2006, Microsoft modified its Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
web browser to appear to side-step the Eolas patent. The change, first discussed in 2003,
requires users to click once on an ActiveX control to "activate" it before they can use its interface. The specific message is "Click to activate this control", shown as a tooltip when the cursor is held over the embedded object. However, following a November 2007 announcement that Microsoft had "licensed the technologies from Eolas",
in April 2008, Microsoft released an update which removed the click-to-activate functionality, reverting the software to its original design.
In June 2006, Opera Software
Opera Software
Opera Software ASA is a Norwegian software company, primarily known for its Opera family of web browsers with over 220 million users worldwide. Opera Software is also involved in promoting Web standards through participation in the W3C. The company has its headquarters in Oslo, Norway and is...
released version 9 of its Opera
Opera (web browser)
Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
browser for Windows and other operating systems, with modifications similar to Microsoft's.
Developers of other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
and Apple's Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...
might feel obliged to either implement a similar change to attempt to avoid infringement or to license Eolas' patent. 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. , no Eolas license has been granted to the Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
which develops the open-source Mozilla Firefox browser.
Workarounds
One workaround is to dynamically create the HTML elementHTML element
An HTML element is an individual component of an HTML document. HTML documents are composed of a tree of HTML elements and other nodes, such as text nodes. Each element can have attributes specified. Elements can also have content, including other elements and text. HTML elements represent...
containing the plugin using JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
, rather than embedding it on the page. In this situation, Internet Explorer did not ask the user for an "activation" click because the patent does not cover embedded scripting.
Opera
Opera (web browser)
Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
users can use User JavaScript functionality in the browser to workaround this issue with locally modified JavaScript.
See also
- WebRouser
- SIGWEBSIGWEBThe Bay Area SIGWEB was a special interest group for the World Wide Web that was founded in August 1993 by the staff of the University of California, San Francisco Center for Knowledge Management , at the direction of CKM Director Dr...
- Transient-key cryptographyTransient-key cryptographyTransient-key cryptography is a form of public-key cryptography wherein keypairs are generated and assigned to brief intervals of time instead of to individuals or organizations...
- Software patentSoftware patentSoftware patent does not have a universally accepted definition. One definition suggested by the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure is that a software patent is a "patent on any performance of a computer realised by means of a computer program".In 2005, the European Patent Office...
- List of software patents
- Intellectual VenturesIntellectual VenturesIntellectual Ventures is a private company notable for being one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents, as of 2011. Its business model has a focus on developing a large patent portfolio and licensing these patents to companies. Publicly, it states that a major goal is to assist small inventors...
- Patent trollPatent trollPatent troll is a pejorative but questioned term used for a person or company who is a non-practicing inventor, and buys and enforces patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered by the target or observers as unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to...
- Microsoft litigationMicrosoft litigationMicrosoft has been involved in numerous high-profile litigations over the history of the company, including cases against the United States, the European Union, and competitors.-Governmental:In its 2008 annual report, Microsoft stated:-Anti-trust:...
External links
- http://www.w3.org/2003/10/27-rogan.htmlLetter of Sir Tim Berners-LeeTim Berners-LeeSir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
to Under Secretary of Commerce] - Butting Heads Over the '906 Rebuttal, Dale Dougherty
- Microsoft documentation on Eolas ActiveX authorization
- Adobe Active Content Center with FAQs, examples, before/after tests, more.
- Apple Computer Eolas workaround for QuickTimeQuickTimeQuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
content - SWFObject Workaround by Geoff Stearns including Flash Player plug-in detection
- Avoiding click-to-activate Workarounds that work for most browsers (Including Opera)
- Quick & Dirty workaround by Aldo Hoeben
- NoIEActivate Short script with automatic installer tool. Fixes most Flash, Java applet and ActiveX control activation issues easily.
- Eolas patent Valid SlashdotSlashdotSlashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
discussion. - WebsiteUpdater Simple program to update any website to work with the new ActiveX changes after the "Eolas" update
- Working around "Click to activate and use this control" Simple JavaScript solution for both Internet Explorer and Opera
- jActivating JavaScript workaround by don_raspu
- Eolas-fix Very efficient, unobtrusive JavaScript workaround for IE and Opera by Már
- Method to fix the MSHTML library to remove the activation (in Spanish) (no longer relevant if the April 2008 patch for IE has been applied)
- Method to fix the opera.dll library to remove the activation
- FIX EOLAS version 2 Improved JavaScript workaround for IE