
Everyone Gets Sued for AJAX Patent? - wglb
http://imvivo.com/DetailsView/tabid/104/IndexID/1779944/Default.aspx
======
decode
This is my favorite part of the article:

 _Intellectual property is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. The primary
reason for this has been the success of the U.S. patent system in allowing the
innovative company in a field to develop and market its new inventions without
having competitors unfairly profit from the innovator's hard work," says Dr.
Doyle._

As far as I can tell, this company doesn't market or sell anything, except
patents. So who are their competitors?

~~~
irrelative
Once you've trolled a couple patents, you come up with catchy platitudes that
make the issue seem less one-sided to the uninformed.

------
n8agrin
Depending on the reading of the patent, one could argue this covers the
entirety of the browser => server request cycle and not just AJAX. Obviously
this is absurd, but perhaps more so is that the patent system upholds this
kind of nonsense. I wonder if the patent office reviewers have any perception
of how their collective foolishness can disrupt the marketplace for good and
evil. I was hoping to argue that this lawsuit may further the adoption of
WebSockets (<http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/>) but after reading portions
of the patent I have to say that I wouldn't be surprised if Eolas claims
WebSockets fall under their ludicrous jurisdiction of "clients manipulating
data objects".

Here's a decent sitepoint article on the matter:
[http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/11/05/violating-eolas-
aj...](http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/11/05/violating-eolas-ajax-
patent/#)

~~~
warfangle
Of course, even if it's limited to the exchange provided by XMLHttpRequest,
the proto-AJAX technology was released as an ActiveX object in 1999:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmlhttprequest#History_and_supp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmlhttprequest#History_and_support)

So, considering that they filed this patent in 2002, there are three years of
prior art to consider.

~~~
n8agrin
I completely agree. How could this point have been missed by the USPTO? Does
copyright really not factor into patent decisions? It's infuriating.

~~~
warfangle
I sillily responded prior to reading the sitepoint link - that is a much
better article than the OP.

------
pierrefar
Oh sheesh. Them again: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas>

If there was ever a patent troll, it's them.

~~~
davidw
At a certain point in time, that guy had actually made some comments to the
effect that they'd limit themselves to Microsoft, rather than pursuing the
thing as much as possible, which seemed, in some ways, a 'decent' thing to do
(and apparently you can do that with patents; not so with trademarks). Looks
like the dollar signs may have won out.

~~~
mahmud
Why on earth would patent-trolling Microsoft be acceptable, even 'decent'?

~~~
davidw
I'm not in favor of patent trolling, but if you're going to do so, I think
they're pretty much fair game. It's not as if Microsoft is a bunch of lily-
white innocents, after all.

Also, what was 'decent' (note the quotes...) was that they were supposedly
just going to go after one group with deep pockets and leave everyone else
alone. Once again: I'm not in favor of patent scams, but the idea that you
would not simply shake everyone and anyone down was sort of well... 'decent'
as far as that stuff goes. So it's sort of a 'negative image' - what's decent
is what they were not going to do, if that makes sense.

~~~
mahmud
It might be bitter-sweet, since MS funded the SCO patent-troll mission, and
would be nice to give them a taste of their own medicine; but you have to
remember, Microsoft invented AJAX. It's just karmically wrong.

~~~
ajross
SCO wasn't suing over patents. It was a copyright thing over the Unix source
code. MS has actually been comparatively benign with their patent behavior
over the years. The FAT thing is the only example I can think of where they've
used one agressively.

Regardless, if something is wrong it's wrong. Our goal here should be getting
the patent system to stop sucking, not using it as a weapon of schadenfreude
against companies we don't like.

------
jerf
This whole patent is annoying because it reflects something that has been
bothering me about the web for a long time. We built this enormous
architecture that is built on TCP/IP, then carefully, oh-so-carefully made
damn sure that it was much, much less functional than the base it was built
on. Only recently are we sort of getting back to the base capabilities of
TCP/IP with web sockets, and by the very phrase "web sockets" you can guess
that they're a bit mucked up. Which they are.

It should hardly be patent-worthy when somebody figures out a way to undo the
damage done to TCP/IP by a higher layer. _Obviously_ TCP/IP is useful, why
would it be remotely surprising that bi-directional communication is a good
idea? It's not like the implementations are that surprising; channels of data
are channels of data. Anyone who doesn't find that an obvious statement is not
"skilled in the art".

I suppose I should rush out to file a patent on layering SSL back onto web
sockets. Or proxying web sockets back to real sockets. If somebody hasn't
already.

~~~
realstevejobs
I share your outrage. Fortunately, WebSockets are specified to be able to
connect over TLS, and proxying WebSockets to TCP was one of the first use
cases for WebSockets.

You could patent using something like SlowAES
(<http://code.google.com/p/slowaes/>) to send encrypted data over a plaintext
WebSocket, but obviously that should not be a patentable "invention."

On a side note, I question why you call WebSockets "mucked up." The connection
handshake differs from TCP to fit the web security model. Overall it is very
close to the wire.

~~~
jerf
Just as you say at the end there. It makes me grumpy that instead of being
able to just pop open a socket to an XMPP server I have to jump through hoops.
I give a specific example, but the principle holds generally. (What will
happen of course is that XMPP servers will adapt to be able to run over web
sockets. Speaking for the server I've spent the most time with as a developer,
ejabberd, it's nearly trivial.)

Security and domain stuff I'm fine with (don't need random web pages open
random connections to SMTP servers and sending out spam!), but we still end up
shut off from a lot of useful existing stuff for what I see as dubious
security benefits since it'll all be proxied and/or re-implemented to work
with websockets anyhow.

------
rimantas
How does it work? Technology itself dates back at least to 1999 when XMLHTTP
ActiveX control for IE was released, or even 1996 when IFrame became
available. Poster-boy for AJAX—GMail—appeared in 2004, the term itself was
coined in 2005.

They were able to get patent for it in 2009. Hmmmm.

~~~
warfangle
It doesn't matter when the patent was granted - it matters when it was filed.

Of course, in this case, it was filed in 2002. The patent is completely bunk.

Considering, however, the eastern district of Texas - it'll probably make it
through. That is, if JP Morgan Chase doesn't fight it.

~~~
axod
People were doing this in the 90s though.

Before XMLHttpRequest it was:

var i = new Image(); i.src = "/something.cgi?SEND_TO_SERVER"

Then when the image is loaded, check the dimensions of it to receive a small
amount of data from the server...

if (i.width==10) { // Server wants us to do X

I remember using this exact code to write an updating scoreboard for a worm
game I wrote in js, in 1999. No pageloads etc. AJAX!

Software patents just need to die completely.

~~~
qeorge
That image trick is brilliant. I have never heard of that before.

~~~
lupin_sansei
another classic technique was to pass a cookie back with the image and you
could then access a couple of Kb of data

------
axod
This sort of thing should not be legal.

How they sleep at night is beyond me.

~~~
ErrantX
Im guessing $500 Million makes a fairly comfy mattress :(

~~~
absconditus
Roy: "So, what do you do, Don?"

Don Draper: "I blow up bridges."

Midge: "Don’s in advertising."

Roy: "No way! Madison Avenue? What a gas!"

Midge: "We all have to serve somebody."

Roy: "Perpetuating the lie. How do you sleep at night?"

Don: "On a bed made of money."

~~~
joe_bleau
Great reference. Chuckle every time I think of it.

------
icey
I'm a total legal noob... Is it possible that lawsuits like this might be
impacted by the outcome of the pending opinion from the Supreme Court on _In
re Bilski_?

~~~
dminor
Perhaps it's a fear of the Bilski outcome that's motivating the "sue everyone"
strategy -- squeeze out some payments before SCOTUS rules.

------
houseabsolute
This is mostly bad, but I can see three bits of good news in the mess:

1\. Litigating against so many companies will take time. Likely the first
patent will have expired long before the current cases have finished. I doubt
they'll have too much more time to sue people, so it's not likely to affect
companies any of us start.

2\. The validity of the second 2004 patent that discusses AJAX and makes
claims that would hurt most of the companies named has not as far as I can
tell yet been tested in a court. It's possible that the plugin patent was
valid, and the AJAX one is not. If so, the danger to us is much less.

3\. The more big companies are hurt by patent trolling, the more effort
they'll likely spend on trying to reform the system.

We'll see how it goes.

------
tjsnyder
I am never surprised to see that software patent trials are always filed in
the eastern district of Texas. I wonder how successful these would be if done
in any other court district.

------
csmeder
Amazon.com is in the list... Maybe a little software patent karma?

------
ErrantX
The combined legal budgets of the defendants must be massive; I wonder if they
really considered that...

~~~
inerte
Microsoft couldn't stop them, now they have a precedent on their side, and 500
million in the bank. I think they'll win.

I just wish this was the defining case of software patents, where companies
would realize why it sucks. Ahhh... probably not.

~~~
MichaelApproved
Did MS actually pay out the $500m yet?

