
Patent troll claims ownership of interactive Web—and might win - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/patent-troll-claims-ownership-of-interactive-weband-might-win.ars
======
ohyes
The real issue here is the hegemony that gives a single coalition governments
the ability dictate worldwide patent and copyright law.

It seems that if that didn't exist, people interested in innovating and
creating great, new, things would just go to the countries that didn't have
forcefully draconian IP laws.

Sure, maybe there are some advantages to having patents, but in their current
form for software, they are a civil version of the thought police.

And mark my words, if MS and IBM and Apple get sued for copyright
infringement, they did this to themselves. They are the ones for lobbied for
this in an attempt to push the little guy out. And it was working until
someone figured out that 'patent trolling' was possible.

In my opinion, patent 'trolling' is a good thing, (as long as it doesn't
happen to me). Why? because the harder they troll, the more obviously broken
the system will be, and the more likely it is to get fixed. Otherwise, patent
litigation is basically restricted to people who already have their own huge
legal departments.

~~~
Vivtek
_In my opinion, patent 'trolling' is a good thing, (as long as it doesn't
happen to me). Why? because the harder they troll, the more obviously broken
the system will be, and the more likely it is to get fixed._

I think this is really naive. People who do dishonest things and get rich from
them are not regarded as a problem in America - they're celebrated as clever
guys and put on Forbes magazine's cover.

~~~
VMG
Any examples?

~~~
jbjohns
Mark Zuckerberg?

------
blacksqr
The article contains at least one factual error. It states that Eolas never
released a web browser of its own; in fact it did release one called WebRouser
in 1995 (three years before the patent actually issued).

For that and other reasons, I don't think Doyle can properly be called a
patent troll, if such is someone who sits on a patent until it becomes
valuable and then springs out of nowhere to demand a cut of profitable
businesses.

Doyle came out with his product before the patent actually issued, and offered
the patent for license to the big players. They turned him down, then cried
foul when he sued them for violating his patent. I don't think they can
realistically claim to have been ambushed or trolled.

Reform of patent law may be a legitimate topic for debate, but Doyle played by
the rules as he found them. He was up front and public about what he was doing
the whole time. Every mortal effort and every conceivable argument have been
made by the bigs to take him down, but the patent stands. Like everyone else,
he deserves at least to have the truth spoken about him.

~~~
Ein2015
1995 was 17 years ago. Why did it take 17 years to start the suits? It's not
like any of this was hidden in those 17 years. Google's been around since
1998. Amazon was from 1995. Yahoo was from 1995. What part of these companies
took 14-17 years to finally bring a suit to? Until I see that, he's a damn
dirty patent troll taking advantage of the status quo.

~~~
wmf
Eolas sued Microsoft in 1999 and the suit took almost a decade to go through
all the appeals and such. After they finished taking down MS, Eolas started
working on suing everyone else. This information is out there if you bother to
look...

------
steve8918
Isn't it companies like Microsoft and IBM that supported software patents in
the first place? You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

That being said, I have a hard time believing that they patented the
"interactive web". My legalese is poor, but from what I read, all you would
need is prior art where you had a basic client-server application that
displayed information from a server, and allowed interaction between the two,
no?

~~~
dangrossman
We're talking about the web the year Mosaic was released. Before 1993 there
were no web browsers that ran in Windows. There were no web search engines
yet. There was little more than static hypertext webpages for research labs.
There may well not have been other client-server applications yet...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web>

~~~
WildUtah
Gopher and Archie and some remote identity/finger protocols already did most
of the things the interactive web does today long before Mosaic showed up.

There have been many beautiful advances since then in usability, bandwidth,
user base, and especially integration with outside services. None of those
things constitute inventions in the sense of being technological, novel, and
non-obvious.

Which doesn't stop absolutely everything from being patented, usually multiple
times. That would require a competent patent office.

~~~
Symmetry
The number of patents the patent office receives has increased exponentially
over the years and the patent office's resources have barely increased at all.
They aren't even allowed to keep all of the patent filing fees they receive
anymore, and Congress has dictated in its wisdom that they aren't allowed to
let the backlog of unjudged patents grow. So don't blame the people at the
patent office, blame our lawmakers.

------
_sentient
What would it take, specifically, to bring about meaningful patent reform? I
hear about the need for it almost daily, but I'm not sure how this sort of
highly convoluted problem can be fixed.

Are there any existing bills or proposals that have put forward a viable
solution to this issue?

~~~
jbarham
The internet is global, legal jurisdictions are national. If the business risk
of infringing patents becomes too high in the US, it creates an incentive for
companies doing business online to move legal jurisdictions, or for other
countries to offer incentives to internet based companies by guaranteeing that
they will not support software patents. Presumably at that point pressure for
patent reform in the US would increase, but by then it may not matter.

In a different context, favorable regulations are one reason that e.g. The
City (i.e., financial district on London) is a global financial hub.

~~~
btilly
If you wish to do business in the USA, you cannot ignore US patent law.
Therefore moving out of the US is a hardship for you with absolutely no
potential upside.

~~~
olefoo
Fortunately for many people, the US is not the only country.

Millions of companies survive and thrive without doing business in the US. At
this time in history, we are used to thinking of the US as being a favorable
business climate; relatively free of corruption with clear rules and low cost
of business formation. It is clear that unless current trends are reversed
that this will not remain the case.

If the governments of the countries of Northern Africa (Algeria, Tunisia,
Libya, Egypt and Morocco) were to form a regional economic initiative that
created those conditions from the Suez Canal to the Atlantic Coast and created
a clean Intellectual Property regime with automatic licensing they would
attract a decent share of global technology investment if they could make it
stick.

Automatic licensing in this context being the rule that no one can deny
another the use of an invention, but proven priority and disclosure grants an
automatic share of the license collected out of the VAT or other tax on
finished goods.

~~~
kijin
Automatic licensing sounds like a very interesting way to balance IP creator
interests with IP consumer interests.

Extend the same principle to copyright: Hollywood can't refuse to sell me a
movie just because I don't live in a certain geographical area, and RIAA can't
deny YouTube users the right to cover and remix their music as long as a
reasonable fee is collected by some other means, whether privately or via a
public distribution scheme.

Perhaps the law should define a nominal amount per work that relieves the
payer of all IP-related liability. The amount could depend on the type of
work, and/or proportional to the profit generated, so that hobbyists who only
copy stuff for personal use pay at the lowest bracket and people who make a
lot of money out of other people's IP pay more, just like taxes.

Are there any obvious downsides to the idea?

------
alain94040
Before you panic, read the claims. From claim 1, the most limiting element I
can see is:

 _wherein said embed text format is parsed by said browser to automatically
invoke said executable application to execute on said client workstation_

So you are potentially in trouble only if you use text format to point to an
executable that you then load to the client.

Indeed, what we used to do on the Internet around 1993 (Gopher, listserv, X11
remote), is not quite exactly the same.

So yes, maybe Java applets and Flash plugins are in trouble (although I don't
really think so). Everything else, no worries.

PS: I just checked the patent date: Oct 1994, not 1993. By then, I remember we
were already launching live videos from web links... Sounds like prior art to
me.

~~~
uxp
There's a bit of a problem, however. The patent (5,838,906) has already been
nullified, and then subsequently reinstated on an appeal.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/05/eolas_web_patent_nul...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/03/05/eolas_web_patent_nullified/)

Tim Berners-Lee has already written about it:

<http://www.w3.org/2003/10/27-rogan.html>

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/30/bernerslee_comes_out...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/30/bernerslee_comes_out_fighting/)

This is still a pretty interesting fight. It might do you some good to panic,
just a little.

------
erikpukinskis
What's scary is that Pei Wei, had he obtained a patent, would probably be able
to defend it.

------
mkramlich
I've seen such a high percentage of laughably bad patents in the software
space that the phrase "patent troll", in my mind, is becoming nearly
redundant.

------
nh
Interesting to note, the law-firm representing Mr. Doyle pays new graduates a
starting salary of $177,500. [1]

[1] www.mckoolsmith.com/careers-summer.html

~~~
jbarham
Considering the insane hours legal associates have to work for several years
for the do-or-die chance at making partner, I wouldn't begrudge them that
salary.

~~~
lwat
Can't they just hire two people for half the price and make them work normal
hours?

~~~
vidarh
They largely could. My wife is a lawyer at one of the largest law firms in the
world, and a lot of what the trainees are doing could've been done by a PA or
secretary, and much of it is certainly trivial to partition.

I'm sure there are legitimate reasons for some people to work long hours
sometimes, but especially for the larger firms and at the lower pay grades,
it's mostly a question of what makes the firm more profitable.

The reason they don't put more people on it unless they absolutely have to is
money. They bill out people by the hour, but pay them a flat rate unless they
are equity partners in the firm.

The harder they work them, the more they bring in for pretty much the same
cost (except free dinner and paid taxi home after certain hours...), and at
the same time, there's rarely an incentive for them to get their staff to work
fast, as long as quality is good enough - if they're exhausted and slow down
and spend more hours, it's more money for the firm.

While trainee salaries at the firm she's at isn't that far off what was
mentioned above, due to the number of hours, trainees there are in effect
making less per hour than the secretaries, and it takes several years post
qualification to get to a decent hourly rate.

The reason they stay? A combination of wanting to make partner, which in this
firm will make you millions a year, and a culture that frames it as personal
failure if you don't meet deadlines that makes it impossible to actually stick
to your contracted hours.

EDIT: So to specifically your question, of why not two people at half the
price. People going for these types of jobs are at least in part driven to go
for the high salaries. Since the pay per hour is laughable for the amount of
education, if they were to halve salaries and hire twice as many people, they
probably would not have many applicants.

------
kprobst
Wouldn't it be easier for all these companies to pool together, pay these
people off, and then come to some sort of agreement with the patent office and
the judicial folks to stop giving trolls wings and venues? It seems that would
be far simpler than to try to reform the patent system, which will probably
happen as soon as pigs start flying.

~~~
ntkachov
Microsoft is probably making just as much off the patent system as any other
troll. They get money from android because of thier patents.

------
wavephorm
As long as they target other software patent trolls like Microsoft and Apple
I'd be perfectly fine with it. They could become the batman of the patent
world.

~~~
astrodust
Microsoft and by extension Nathan Myhrvold are the ones running wild with
patent lawsuits and using patents to strong-arm software companies. Microsoft
claims FAT32 is an important, patented invention, and is trying to wrestle
back control of SMB through the same tactics. SCO's legal assault against
Linux is part of all this.

They've also successfully fought against Android and are now exacting stiff
taxes on a lot of the Android devices sold because of the "technology" that's
being used.

Apple's litigation has recently centred around design patents, not software
patents, presumably to push Samsung into making their own designs and not just
copying everyone Apple like they used to copy RIM.

Apple surely has an enormous stockpile of software patents, but their lawsuit
activity has been pretty limited. I hear lots of bitching about people not
getting into the App Store, but not much a thing about individuals being sued
by Apple over software patents.

Apple's royalty payments seem restricted to those regarding specifically
negotiated rights such as for the enormous multitude of officially licensed
iPod/iPad/iPhone accessories. You can hardly fault them for this when the
accessory market is so profitable for the companies involved in it.

If Apple stopped making iPods the market would dry up, but conversely,
Microsoft's "technology" has no bearing on the success or failure of things
like Android.

~~~
dwyer
>Apple surely has an enormous stockpile of software patents, but their lawsuit
activity has been pretty limited.

Yes, $100 million on lawsuits in one year is pretty limited.

[http://www.itproportal.com/2012/01/24/apple-spent-
staggering...](http://www.itproportal.com/2012/01/24/apple-spent-
staggering-100-million-case-against-htc-claims-site/)

~~~
astrodust
Clearly Apple does not use bargain basement lawyers.

Secondly, why is that surprising that the largest tech company gets some
enormous legal bills? You think Google's budget is just a couple of million?

By the way, Google's going after a chunk of the iOS pie by claiming patent
violations: [http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/09/google-after-2-25-of-every-
ip...](http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/09/google-after-2-25-of-every-iphone-sale/)

So much for being "open".

------
rickmode
Clearly the patent is invalid: the Internet is represented as a bean, not a
cloud.

------
four
I just love this. Lots of dick-swinging and heart-bleeding and whining and
greed. There is no right side in this. Everyone just wants their way.

The web is not some inalienable right handed down from God for the betterment
of humanity. It's a clever idea that lots of people find handy. Kleenex and
eyeglasses are clever, too. I don't see a movement to free tissue paper.

Why is anyone shocked by the prospect that it may come at a cost, directly or
indirectly?

Life's too short, and too beautifully wonderous, to waste fretting about who's
greed is good and who's is bad or unfair. Drama, drama.

~~~
artursapek
I'm mostly with you but can't you empathize more with the companies he's
suing, who have developed the seed of an idea to an extraordinary level, than
with him and his small shitty company, who just patented an abstraction and
never did much with it?

