Eolas Continues, SPX Settles, Mythic Sues

The transition from 2003 to 2004 was busy for Microsoft’s legal team, which not only faced a new private antitrust lawsuit from RealNetworks (see “RealNetworks Files Antitrust Suit“) but also garnered an unfavorable decision in the Eolas patent infringement suit over Internet Explorer (IE), settled a patent infringement claim with industrial equipment manufacturer SPX, and faced a trademark claim from video game maker Mythic Entertainment.

Eolas Technologies won another round in its patent infringement case against Microsoft, as a federal judge refused to suspend an earlier jury verdict and ordered Microsoft to pay more than US$45 million in “prejudgment interest” as it mounts an appeal.

The original verdict, reached in Aug. 2003, found that IE infringed an Eolas patent covering the ability of a Web browser to automatically launch and execute interactive programs in a Web page, and awarded Eolas more than US$520 million. If upheld, it would force Microsoft to change IE to avoid patent infringement; Web developers would then have to make changes to certain Web pages or else visitors to their sites would face a cascade of dialog boxes. (For details, see “Lawsuit Drives Browser Changes” on page 7 of the Nov. 2003 Update.) As a consequence of this broad impact, the W3C has joined Microsoft in asking the U.S. Patent Office to invalidate Eolas’s patent based on prior art. In Dec. 2003, the Patent Office agreed to review the patent—an unusual event, suggesting that it sees some validity to the challenge.