W3C moves on plug-in patent dispute

By Alun Williams

Posted on 4 Sep 2003 at 16:55

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which looks after Web standards is looking into the implications of the court ruling involving Microsoft and Eolas - Microsoft loses $500 million plus patent battle.

The Web standards body has held an Ad Hoc Meeting on the patent dispute and has opened a general discussion email forum.

You can find the W3C mailing list here.

It was last month that a federal court in Chicago decided Microsoft must pay Eolas $520.6 million in compensation for infringing a patent. But the wider implication of the case is its possible impact on the entire Web.

The patent covers the technology for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents - such as Web pages - where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document and where there is a means for the end-user to control the object's operation. It could cover a whole sector of Internet content, including plug-ins (Flash for instance), applets and scriptlets.