John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Eolas Sues Internet

villainThree years after squeezing a settlement out of Microsoft for alleged infringements of its controversial patent on embedded Web applications, Eolas Technologies hopes to do the same to a bunch of other big tech outfits.

This morning, the research and development company filed suit against nearly two dozen companies, accusing them of violating two of its patents–U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906, the same one Microsoft allegedly ran afoul of, and No. 7,599,985, an extension of the 906 patent that covers embedded apps using AJAX. Among the companies named in the suit: Adobe (ADBE), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), eBay (EBAY), Google (GOOG)–including YouTube–Sun (JAVA) and Yahoo (YHOO).

“All we want is what’s fair,” Eolas Chairman Dr. Michael Doyle said in a statement. “We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources. Profiting from someone else’s innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair.”

Sadly, “what’s fair” in this case threatens the very fabric of the Web, as Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web argued back in 2003 when Eolas was pursuing Microsoft (MSFT). “The ’906 patent will cause cascades of incompatibility to ripple through the Web,” Berners-Lee said in an appeal to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “[It] is a substantial setback for global interoperability and the success of the open Web.”

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work