Web changes
This may not be news to y'all, but I was totally unaware of it until today.
A tiny company named Eolas has successfully sued Microsoft for patent infringement. The patent in question is (to slightly oversimplify) for a web browser's ability to seamlessly show the content of a plugin as part of a web page. For example, IE's ability to show Flash animations or Java applets in the browser window is covered by this patent.
Those of you who don't put plugin content on your pages won't be affected by this. But if you're embedding Flash or applets or ActiveX controls or VRML or QuickTime (I think?) or various other things (usually denoted with an <object> or <embed> tag) in your pages (yes, even if your Flash content is only a banner ad), you should definitely pay attention, because the way IE (and possibly every other browser) displays your pages will change.
As far as I can tell, based on reading an awful lot about it this afternoon (but I don't have any idea how reliable my sources were), the Eolas guy created a browser back in 1993-1994 that had the ability to display a certain kind of plugin content, and he proceeded to patent this capability. He apparently warned various companies that he was applying for the patent, but they all apparently said, "Come back to us when you actually get the patent." So, four years later when the patent was granted, he came back. And he told Microsoft to (a) pay up, and (b) stop distributing IE.
Needless to say, MS was not at all happy about this development, and so the matter went to court. And now, five years later, MS has lost. The court has awarded Eolas (and the University of California, which is where the Eolas guy worked when he applied for the patent, and which therefore owns the patent; Eolas controls all the commercial rights) $500 million, plus over $100 million in back interest.
MS is going to appeal, but they no longer seem entirely convinced that the appeal will win. They did try to prove "prior art"—another guy claims to have developed similar technology on his own in 1993—but if the other technology did exist prior to the Eolas guy's browser, it hadn't ever been publicly demonstrated, and there's no definitive evidence that it actually existed. Lesson to all you software types: keep timestamped copies of all the drafts your code goes through, and take notes on who you demo it to and when.
It appears, though this isn't entirely clear, that the Eolas guy simply has it in for Microsoft; he'd like to tear down the IE monopoly, making it possible for other browsers to compete again. Patents, unlike trademarks, don't have to be enforced to be kept; he can pick and choose who he wants to sue and/or demand licensing fees from.
But of course things aren't going as planned. There's no way MS is going to either stop shipping their browser or eviscerate it and remove its plugin capabilities. Instead, MS has come up with an approach to handling plugins that their lawyers feel isn't covered by the patent:
Leave everything just as it is, except that every time the user goes to a page that contains plugin content, the browser displays a dialog box that says something like "Click OK to continue loading the page." The dialog box has an OK button but no Cancel button.
Yes, this is a terrible user experience. Can you say "unintended consequences"?
MS will be shipping a new version of IE in a couple months that has this behavior.
Meanwhile, other browser makers are dubious about Eolas's claims that it's not gonna sue them; I suspect they'll all follow MS's lead.
There is another option if you as a web page author want to avoid having users see that dialog box: you can use a clunky workaround to embed the plugin material using JavaScript. There are several potential problems with this approach:
- It's clunky and inelegant from an authoring perspective. Which isn't a big deal from a user perspective, but annoying to people who make web pages.
- You'll have to make this change on every single page of your site that has plugin content.
- It only works if the visitor to your site has JavaScript turned on. Granted, a fair number of the people who turn off JS (it's on by default in most browsers) won't be able to and/or won't want to view plugin content anyway, but it's worth keeping in mind.
- It may not solve the problem, because Eolas says that this approach and MS's dialog-box approach still violate the patent. MS denies that, but that just means it'll go to court again; it could be that, a year after re-coding all your pages to use this clunky JS workaround, you'll have to change them all again.
(MS has also proposed another kind of fix for certain pages, but that one involves adding an MS-only proprietary attribute to a tag, and doesn't apply in several cases anyway.)
Discussion of this case online has been interesting. Almost everything I've seen has said, "Yeah, MS is evil, but software patents in general are also evil, and this particular one is particularly evil."
Obviously, Macromedia is potentially affected by this in a big way, so I'm a wee bit biased. (Some people add "Flash is evil too" to the above discussion, but I disagree; I think Flash is just widely misunderstoodused. But again, I'm biased.) To help ease the transition, MM has supplied information about the JS solution, which is MM's recommended solution at this point. Yes, it is mighty ironical that the presentation provided to explain things was done in Macromedia Breeze, which uses Flash. (And is, imo, one of the best uses for Flash out there.)
Apple is in a similar boat regarding QuickTime content, and is a potential lawsuit target (because Safari also displays plugin content). Apple, too, is recommending the JS solution.
For lots more information about the whole mess, see the Eolas '906 patent backgrounder, an extremely useful resource for everything related to what various people are calling "the Eolas matter." If you're interested in the prior-art question, click the "Judge's ruling" link on the backgrounder page (it's a PDF file, which some browsers may be able to display inline), in the Viola section; that gives much more detailed information about that aspect of the case than any of the other material I've seen about it online.
There've also been several SlashDot stories about the situation, but they've all consisted largely of people yelling about how awful software patents are, so I'm not gonna link to them. (I agree with the anti-software-patent sentiment, but that's not really useful in understanding the impact of this case.)
Anyway, in the long run this probably isn't such a huge deal. A bunch of users have a noticeably worse experience on the web, until web designers change over to the clunky JS workaround (though according to Mark Pilgrim, 11% of Internet users don't use JavaScript), and then everything is more or less back to business as usual. Net result: Eolas gets half a billion dollars from MS and costs the world's web designers a fair bit of time and annoyance. Somehow I don't think that's what the Eolas guy had in mind.
