W3C Seeks Re-examination of Eolas Browser Patent: "The World Wide Web Consortium is seeking a reexamination of a Web browser patent that it says threatens to undermine the smooth operation of the Web."

The patent is at the heart of a legal wrangle between Eolas Technologies Inc., which holds a license to it from the University of California, and Microsoft Corp. Microsoft in August lost a $521 million patent-infringement jury verdict in the case and since has announced changes to its Internet Explorer browser that it says sidesteps the patent's method for embedding and invoking interactive applications such as plug-ins and applets from Web browsers.

On Tuesday, W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee sent a letter to the United States Patent and Trademark Office formally requesting a reexamination of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906. The Web standards group claims that the patent is invalid because "prior art" (a legal term in patent law referring to whether an invention existed prior to the filing of a patent) was not considered at the time the patent was granted in 1998 or during the trial.

"A patent whose validity is demonstrably in doubt ought not be allowed to undo years of work that have gone into building the Web," Berners-Lee wrote in his letter to James E. Rogan, undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property in the patent office

In a separate filing with the patent office, the W3C last week outlined examples of prior art, including two publications from a Hewlett Packard Laboratories researcher, Dave Raggett, about a proposed HTML+ specification that it says were published a year before the patent filing.

The W3C claims that the publications describe the EMBED tag in HTML+ in an identical way to the EMBED tag in the patent.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1366698,00.asp