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In the letter, Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director, urges the office to consider critical prior art (evidence that the concepts described in the patent were already in existence) that he believes renders the Eolas patent invalid.

If Eolas is allowed to proceed with the enforcement of its patent, Berners-Lee forsees, 'substantial economic and technical damage' to the operation of World Wide Web.

'The impact of this patent will be felt not only by those who are alleged to directly infringe, but all whose Web pages and applications rely on the stable, standards-based operation of browsers threatened by this patent. In many cases, those who will be forced to incur the cost of

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modifying Web pages or software applications do not even themselves infringe the patent - assuming it is even valid.'

Eolas is a small developer that was granted the '906 patent in 1998 oversing the embedding of small interactive programs, such as plug-ins, applets, scriptlets or ActiveX Controls, into Web pages.

In August of this year it won a $500m suit against Microsoft for infringing that patent in the ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer. Microsoft has since opted to design out the infringing code, but Berners-Lee is concerned that doing so 'would render millions of Web pages and many products of independent software developers incompatible with Microsoft's product.'

'The Web functions only on the strength of its common standards,' he said. 'The '906 patent will cause cascades of incompatibility to ripple through the Web.'

Berners-Lee notes that the Eolas patent on embedding programs to produce content in the same frame as a given Web page had been described in a previous W3C publication. He also asserts that this was already being done by other programs, such as Write, which allowed the embedding of images generated in Paint.

See also:

Eolas seeks Internet Explorer ban