If a stop to this nonsense isn’t put in place soon no one will be able to safely program because of litigation.
I think it would be a pretty difficult case to prove
I was serious also. I wish we could sue spammers and troll’s, at least the lawyer would be doing something good for society, instead of ambulance chasing, bottom feeders.
Actually you got that backwards… That was the Eolas patent and Microsoft IE was the only one who got hit by it. As I recall it was related to how IE activates Flash via Activex. At any rate I think they were hit with $500 Million in damages after the dust settled. IE was the only browser I recall that you had to click to get Flash to work on if you didn’t include the Javascript workaround.
Anyway, this patent isn’t about the browser… It’s about information systems and a form of hierarchical menus that the holder of the patent is targeting website’s with.
That said, I doubt this patent will even see the light of day in court as it’s so vague anyone who is using a computer to access information would be infringing on it.
Patent laws were designed for physical things, basically. They weren’t designed for software techniques (or genes… but that’s another rant).
On the specific topic… they’d have to take me to court before I’d shell out a time. It’s rather ridiculous. The terminology in the patent is so general, it could probably be overturned on that basis (patents are supposed to be very specific).
One way to interpret the clause described on the arstechinica web page would be to say “you mean using an index” and indexes have been around for a rather long time. To then add the words “via a computer” and “via an electronic pointing device” and claim that gives you the right to issue an invoice for a licence quite simply means no-one can do anything with a computer to access information without “breaking” their patent.
But computers were used to access information before their patent was granted.
Even clicking on a file name in windows explorer from Win 3.1 would be covered by their patent which came out a while after Win 3.1.
Let’s try ignoring the word index as they do keep refering to computers and electronic pointing devices…
Unfortunately the mother of all demos shows an electronic pointing device being used to access information about 25 years before their “patent” was issued.
Give up now, Webvention, you’re on a loser.
Yeah they probably want to avoid court as the courts could and very likely would find their patent invalid.
It is cases like this and others that show how “screwed” up the American Patent system is.
The fact alone that you can patent a basic idea like this, is hilarious; and as others has mention there is even worse examples of this.
On the bright side, the only place these “patents” can be enforced is in US, and even there if it hit the court system it is not certain if it would hold up.
Be careful. There are several lawyers who answer questions on the SitePoint forums some of whom are sure to object to your implying that they are male…
The big thing needed to overturn such nonsense would be prior art; since GUI’s have had rollover effects on things like dropdown menus dating back to the original Xerox GUI, you could use it, Windows, MacOs, NextStep, GeOS, and every other major computer UI as prior art examples.
Hell, the wording is so vague you could probably use how Visicalc handled highlighting selected cells as an example of prior art.
See what happened when some dipshits went after Red Hat/Novell and an Amiga 1000 came to the rescue.
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100513121121635
Good point - they used to be done with javascript, but are now performed more regularly with css.
I’ll shift this along to the web design forum.