Eolas Web plug-ins patent annulled

By Steve Malone

Posted on 8 Mar 2004 at 10:08

The US Patent Office has rescinded the controversial patent granted to Eolas governing the execution of remote code on Web pages. Last year the company successfully sued Microsoft in an Illinois court for 'patent infringement' and won damages of $521mn.

The Patent Office's invalidation of the claim will come as a welcome relief not only to Microsoft, but to millions of Internet Explorer users and website developers. Until now, Microsoft was faced with the prospect of altering Internet Explorer to comply with the patent. This would have meant that a number of applets such as Flash and Quicktime as well as Redmond's own ActiveX technology would have been disallowed, and that Web pages using these technologies would no longer work with IE and would have to be recoded.

The original jury verdict caused shock waves throughout the Internet community with the Web's inventor Tim Berners Lee denouncing it as potentially 'impairing the usability of the Web'. He had called upon the Patent Office to invalidate the claim. This was made more urgent when last month an Illionois District Court judge upheld the original verdict.

Eolas has 60 days to appeal the decision which, given the amount of money at stake, is highly likely. The patent 5,838,906 was granted to Eolas in 1998