The Seattle Times: Microsoft: Microsoft may alter browser
Microsoft, which this month was found to have infringed on a patented method for viewing Internet pages, is expected to make changes to its Web-browser software, according to the World Wide Web Consortium trade group.
Innovators don’t infringe patents, do they? Especially given the army of talent in both software and legal code they can bring to bear, this seems a little hard to take. On top of the “big ball of mud” design of Windows, we now learn that the lynchpin of their dominance wasn’t even invented at Microsoft.
Gah.
from http://www.w3.org/2003/08/patent
By now, most of those reading this know of the recent court case of Eolas v. Microsoft in regards to US Patent 5,838,906. The patent claims to cover mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object’s data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object’s implementation to support user interaction with the object. The implementation can be local or distributed across a network, and is automatically invoked based upon type information in the document or associated with the object’s data. See the patent claims for details and for the precise scope of the patent. This patent may potentially have implications for the World Wide Web in general, including specifications from W3C.
In the near term, Microsoft has indicated to W3C that they will very soon be making changes to its Internet Explorer browser software in response to this ruling. These changes may affect a large number of existing Web pages. W3C does not yet have any indication of what action, if any, other vendors of Web tools might take. In the longer term, should the court decision be upheld in its current form, some participants suggested that other action might be required. W3C has made efforts to contact the patent holder to determine their future intentions, but has not received any reply.
I don’t know if any other rendering engines are in violation of this patent. But it makes sense to monitor the discussion list that W3C is sponsoring to make sure the issue gets a good airing.