An appeals court should throw out a $500m (£260m) patent
infringement judgement against Microsoft because a lower court
failed to recognise that the patent was not invented by the company
awarded the money, a Microsoft lawyer claimed
yesterday.
Lawyer Constantine Trela told an appeals court in Washington
that the Eolas Technologies patent that allowed web browsers to
recognise and run embedded applications on web pages had been
demonstrated by Pei-Yuan Wei in May 1993, more than five years
before the Eolas patent was granted.
But Eolas lawyer Martin Lueck argued that the patent was valid
because Wei abandoned the functionality in later versions of his
Viola web browser and never demonstrated his browser's ability to
run embedded applications to anyone.
Lueck rejected the suggestion that Wei made the functionality
public and improved the browser. "That's not what happened. If you
put a feature in a piece of software, and you never show it to
anyone, you never give it to anyone, and you never use it again,
that's abandonment."
The Eolas lawsuit against Microsoft, filed in 1999, prompted an
outcry from several web experts, including Tim Berners-Lee,
director of the World Wide Web Consortium. The US Patent Office
re-examined the patent and rejected it last March.
Grant Gross writes for IDG News Service