Two years after he first wrote about it, Executive Editor A. Russell Jones brings us up to speed on the patent dispute that is about to change Web browsing much for the worse.
by A. Russell Jones, Executive Editor
December 13, 2005
bout two years ago, I wrote an editorial explaining (and excoriating) the Eolas lawsuit—or more pointedly, the patent itself. Given Microsoft's recent announcement that it's planning to change Internet Explorer to circumvent the patent, it's worth following up on what's happened in the past couple of years and put a punctuation mark on a rather ugly affair.
The Eolas lawsuit claimed that Michael Doyle (president of Eolas) invented a way to seamlessly embed and interact with external applications via the World Wide Web when he was the director of the University of California academic computing center. UC applied for a patent for this idea, and later gave Eolas (founded by Doyle) exclusive rights to the pending patent in 1995; the patent was officially granted in 1998.
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bout two years ago, I wrote an 
