Eolas v. Everyone you've ever heard of

Filed under: Business, Developer, Web services, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, web 2.0

Tireless patent troll Intellectual Property holder Eolas has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against, well.. nearly everyone. The issue at hand deals with two patents in Eolas' possession -- the first of which was the subject of a successful lawsuit against Microsoft back in 2004.

The second patent, what Eolas refers to as "a continuation of the '906 patent" claims to hold as the sole intellectual property of Eolas, "fully-interactive embedded applications [...] through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques." The second patent is so far untested in court -- and ostensibly covers more popular websites than you can shake a knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag at.

I haven't had time to delve into the language of the patent, but this reeks of utter nonsense to me so far. In my layman's oppinion, Eolas may have made a crucial mistake however, taking aim at so many large targets at once -- with one untested patent, and another which Microsoft already came rather close to beating.

Take the leap to read the whole extortion demand press release, and see the enormous list of publicly traded web firms included.

Continue reading Eolas v. Everyone you've ever heard of

Eolas v. Everyone you've ever heard of originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments