Legal Issues

Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick




Tim Berners-Lee Demonstrates Prior Art Against Eolas Patent

from the show-'em dept

Continuing the good fight against silly patents, Tim Berners-Lee has sent a long letter to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office detailing examples of prior art on how to embed a program within a browser. The letter asks the USPTO to invalidate the Eolas patent - which Eolas is using to hold Microsoft hostage. There seems to be a ton of prior art, and it's hardly "non-obvious" to embed one program within another. This whole mess just demonstrates some of the problems with software patents, and companies that use them to restrict, rather than encourage, innovation.

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