Me, Supporting Microsoft?

That's right, I am now going to come in on an issue and support Microsoft. A weird place to be for me. But over the last two months, the Redmond giant lost a patent infringement case with Eolas. Normally, this doesn't bother me much (I mean, Microsoft has lost or settled many cases concerning patent infringement), but this one strikes deep into my territory - the use of plug-ins on the web

Eolas gained rights to a University of California 1994 patent whereby information could be remotely accessed by an application through small "applets" or plug-ins, minature applications that loaded information from a server. Sounding familiar yet? They started their legal proceedings against Microsoft in 1999, claiming that Windows 95, Windows 98, and Internet Explorer violated their patents with it's use of Active X and other technologies. Well, back in July the court upheld Eolas' claims, and the case is currently winding it's way toward appeals.

Now, I don't mind giving up Active X. But the broadly written patent applies to any plug-in technology, such as Flash, Quicktime, Java, etc. Basically, if you can embed it in a web page, it is violating the patent. This is a big, big deal - embedding technology into web pages and browsers is commonplace now, and their delivery of media-rich applications is one reason for the growth of the broadband web. I just shudder to think that every single browser is now, in one way or another, illegal and at the mercy of Eolas and their legal department.

In many ways, this reminds me of the current legal uproar between SCO and the Linux community. Like that issue, here is a small company with a questionable business plan using the patent and copyright laws to survive an otherwise unsupportive marketplace. The only difference, that I see right away, is that Eolas really does have legal legs to stand on. But isn't there a point when the good of the public must override the good of the few? That the web could, in all honesty, revert to a technological state more like 1993 than 2003 gives one pause. And yet, without such legal protections, large corporations like Microsoft could easily steal and bully smaller companies like Eolas (okay, I guess they did that already).

This issues has such wide reaching implications that the W3C, the governing Internet Standards Body, is showing fear and organizing to find alternatives to this problem. eWeek, among many others, is beginning to cover this issue, and I suspect we shall hear much more about it in the coming months. Keep your fingers crossed and enjoy your Strongbad Emails now - you might not be able to view them next year!