Eolas Is Baaaaaaaaack; And It's Suing Everyone Over Embeddable Web Widgets

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Eolas Is Baaaaaaaaack; And It's Suing Everyone Over Embeddable Web Widgets

from the because-otherwise... dept

Well, here we go again. As you may recall, Eolas is a company that claimed to hold a patent (5,838,906) on browser plugins. The company sued Microsoft, and a long drawn-out battle ensued. Even though web inventor Tim Berners-Lee presented prior art and asked the USPTO to invalidate Eolas' ridiculously broad and obvious patent, the USPTO eventually upheld the patent (after initially rejecting claims). Even as Microsoft began presenting evidence that it actually had made use of the technology in question before Eolas applied for its patent, losses in the courts and the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case eventually resulted in Microsoft agreeing to settle rather than continue to fight.

Since then (two years ago), plenty of people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, concerning Eolas' plans to sue others. Now we know why it waited. It's now received a new patent -- a continuation patent, which is often used to abuse the patent system by putting forth a broad patent, then filing for continuations to make changes that let an earlier "invention" cover technologies that later become popular. In this case, the new patent (7,599,985), which basically just extends the earlier patent on browser plugins, and extends it to javascript widgets. Yes, those embeddable widgets used all over the web? It appears that Eolas thinks that those are infringing and everyone should pay up.

The new lawsuit has been filed against Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises, Staples, Sun, Texas Instruments, Yahoo, and YouTube. Apparently, starting small isn't part of the plan. Not surprisingly, Eolas filed in Eastern Texas using McKool Smith -- one of the most popular law firms representing patent holding firms in East Texas.

I am honestly curious how patent system defenders, who are also programmers, can defend this. I'm sure non-programmers will claim that the patent is valid, but I can't imagine how anyone who has any knowledge of basic programming principles can claim that such a patent is valid. In the meantime, tons of companies doing an incredibly basic thing on the web will now have to waste millions of dollars fighting a ridiculous patent lawsuit. How is this promoting innovation in any way shape or form?

Legal Issues

Thu, Jun 11th 2009 9:04pm

Filed Under:
copyright, design software, indesign, k2

Companies:
adobe, brookhaven typesetting services

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Copyright Infringement Requires A Lot More Than Vague Similarities

from the ain't-the-same dept

Michael Scott points us to a story about a lawsuit accusing Adobe of copyright infringement for its InDesign software product. The complaint was from a company called Brookhaven Typesetting Services. The judge sided with Adobe -- and it isn't difficult to see why. What is difficult is figuring out how or why Brookhaven thought it had a case. The company apparently had a page layout software product called K2 back in the early 90s. At some point, the company tried to license it to Aldus, who had a popular page layout software called PageMaker -- including sending Aldus the source code. Aldus, of course, was eventually bought by Adobe, and Adobe eventually released InDesign as a replacement for PageMaker. So what's the complaint? Well, when InDesign was in development, its code name was K2. So, yes, it was a similar page layout software, and the code name was the same as Brookhaven's product name. So you could see where Brookhaven would be initially suspicious. But the problem was that there was no fire behind the smoke. A comparison of the two products' source code showed no similarities whatsoever. The product was clearly entirely separate. Yet, once Brookhaven lost the case... it still appealed, only to have now lost again. For some reason, some people seem to think that any similarity at all is copyright infringement, but that's simply not true.

Predictions

Thu, Mar 27th 2008 6:56pm

Filed Under:
desktop software, freemium, online software, photoshop

Companies:
adobe

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Will The Freemium Model Work For Photoshop?

from the may-be-a-tough-call dept

Adobe made some news today by launching a free web-based low-end version of Adobe Photoshop. The idea is that Adobe hopes this will convince people to upgrade to the for-fee desktop software packages or (potentially) higher end online offerings from Adobe. This should be an interesting experiment for a variety of reasons. First, it definitely makes sense for Adobe to head down this path -- because if it didn't others would pop up and do the same (in fact there already are a few web-based Photoshop clones out there). So, joining this space earlier, rather than later, gives Adobe a chance to help define it, rather than be defined by it.

Adobe also has an advantage in the fact that it dominates this market. Even with free offerings like The Gimp out there, many graphic designers and photographers swear by the Photoshop interface and tools. The question, though, is how well this offering will be adopted. There are already some concerns about performance, which can matter a great deal when doing image editing. Furthermore, if this free online offering is there to serve as a way to push people to sign up for paid offerings, there will be pressures on the development team not to make the product as good as can be -- and that will keep open a wide opportunity for others to come in and provide a better product. No matter what, it's nice to see yet another large traditional client-side software provider experimenting with web-based offerings. Finally, simply porting a desktop software to the web isn't all that appealing. Services like Writely took off not because they were word processing clones (or free) but because they offered something useful that was different. In the case of Writely, it was the ability to do real-time collaboration over a document. So as long as Adobe focuses on creating those useful things that are different than what can be done on the desktop client, this could have some potential. But merely moving a feature-lacking version of a desktop client to the web probably isn't enough.

(Mis)Uses of Technology

Wed, Feb 20th 2008 6:38pm

Filed Under:
competition, drm, flash

Companies:
adobe

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Why Is Adobe Trying To Add DRM To Flash?

from the anti-competitive-reasons dept

The EFF's Deeplinks blog has an excellent discussion about Adobe's plans to add DRM to Flash. Flash has become something of a defacto standard online, and it's partly the lack of included DRM that allowed this to happen, encouraging creative uses, such as mashups. However, with the latest version of Flash, apparently Adobe wants to include DRM. As the EFF notes, this clearly is not to stop copyright infringements -- as no DRM has ever stopped copyright infringement. However, thanks to the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause, it will make it possible for Adobe to block out competitors from making tools and players to work on Flash, by failing to license that DRM to them as well. This was not the purpose of the DMCA at all.

(Mis)Uses of Technology

Fri, Dec 28th 2007 9:42am

Filed Under:
cs3, spyware

Companies:
adobe, omniture

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Adobe Spying On Its Customers

from the now-that's-just-not-very-nice dept

It's not all that surprising these days to hear about software companies having their software "phone home" in some manner or another, though it's often quite annoying. However, it looks like Adobe has taken this to a new level. As highlighted by Valleywag, Adobe's CS3 design software includes a system to provide your usage data quietly to a "behavioral analytics" firm named Omniture. Of course, it does this without ever asking you if you want some random company knowing every time you use this piece of software. While it may not be doing anything nefarious, this certainly has all the hallmarks of spyware, including the fact that it tries to (weakly) disguise the connection to Omniture by making it look like it's simply pinging your local network. It's really amazing that companies keep doing this type of thing thinking that people won't catch on. There may be plenty of legitimate reasons for tracking the usage of a piece of software -- but if so, why not be upfront about it and let the user of the software opt-in to sharing his or her data? Yet another reason to use a firewall that catches these sorts of sneaky outbound connections. Update: John Dowdell, an Adobe employee (and long time Techdirt reader) has replied in the comments, noting that he's talking to folks at Adobe to find out the whole story, but he thinks it's the "live update" function. I'm not sure I understand why a live update function would call an analytics firm -- or why the ping to that analytics firm should be disguised as a local network ping, but that's the story coming out of Adobe right now. Will update again if any more details become clear. Update 2: Further response from Adobe here. It explains what the connection does and also admits that the company should have done a better job making it clear.

(Mis)Uses of Technology

Mon, Oct 1st 2007 7:08am

Filed Under:
office suites, online

Companies:
adobe, google, microsoft