{"id":187011,"date":"2013-07-23T20:09:00","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T01:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/07\/23\/a-patent-troll-bites-the-dust\/"},"modified":"2013-07-23T20:09:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-24T01:09:00","slug":"a-patent-troll-bites-the-dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/07\/23\/a-patent-troll-bites-the-dust\/","title":{"rendered":"A Patent Troll Bites the Dust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the worst of the parasite, Eolas, has <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2013\/07\/the-webs-longest-nightmare-ends-eolas-patents-are-dead-on-appeal\/\">had its patents invalidated<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, had never testified in court before last year. In February 2012, he left Cambridge to fly down to Tyler, an East Texas city of about 100,000, to testify at a patent trial. It was the culmination of a bold campaign by a man named Michael Doyle to levy a vast patent tax on the modern web.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Berners-Lee was one of several web pioneers who came through the court during the course of a four-day trial, which ultimately convinced a jury to invalidate two patents owned by Eolas, the tiny patent-holding company that Doyle and his lawyers transformed into one of the most fearsome &#8220;patent trolls&#8221; of all time.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Now Eolas appears to be gone for good. The company mounted a lengthy appeal, but it was all for naught; this morning, a three-judge appeals panel affirmed the jury&#8217;s verdict without comment.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Pei-Yuan Wei created the pioneering Viola browser, a key piece of prior art, while he was a student at UC-Berkeley in the early 1990s. Scott Silvey, another UC-Berkeley student at that time, testified about a program he made called VPlot, which allowed users to rotate an image of an airplane using Wei&#8217;s browser. VPlot and Viola were demonstrated to Sun Microsystems in May 1993, months before Doyle claimed to have conceived of his invention.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Eolas claimed an tremendously broad patent on all forms of interactive web products. <\/p>\n<p>Why the f%$# has Eolas been able to blackmail people for so long?<\/p>\n<p>Seriously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the worst of the parasite, Eolas, has had its patents invalidated: The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, had never testified in court before last year. In February 2012, he left Cambridge to fly down to Tyler, an East Texas city of about 100,000, to testify at a patent trial. It was the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,997,1109,1191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-internet","category-ip","category-patent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187011"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}