“Let’s set aside the societal value (or lack thereof) of allowing people to patent things that are obvious. Let’s also suspend, for a moment, our collective distaste for any organization that accumulates patents—effectively licenses for technologies that they had no part in creating.”
That’s how Plum’s CEO Andy Kuan began his thoughts when I asked him about patent trolls. It should give you an idea of how creators—people who actually make things—feel about the companies out there that work the patent system to make money without actually creating a thing—patent trolls.
On Thursday, a federal court in East Texas ruled against Eolas Technologies and its partner the University of California, which had sued over a dozen companies—including Adobe, Amazon, Apple, eBay, Google, Yahoo and You-Tube—for infringement on patents for technologies that make the Internet more interactive.
Basically, the plaintiffs claimed that “some basic Internet features used their technology, including music clips, search features, maps, advertisements and embedded applications,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
Wired magazine reports that, to refute the claims, the defendants brought along Pei-Yuan Wei, developer of an early web browser called Viola, and none other than Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who most people credit as the inventor of the web.
According to CNN, the judgment means that other suits by Eolas and the University of California against Google, Yahoo and others won’t go forward.
(By the way, I was surprised by the University of California, but Eolas head Michael Doyle was a researcher there when he did some of the work that led to the patents, according to Bloomberg.)
“After the trial, Judge Leonard Davis visited with the jurors a while, as is his custom—they were awed, I’m told (as they often are), why such an important web case ended up in Tyler,” wrote Joe Mullin of Wired Magazine. “Apparently they were a little star-struck by Tim Berners-Lee, although you certainly couldn’t tell during trial.”
Note that Mullin wrote “as they often are” in his article. Which brings up the question of why such an important and high-profile Internet case was tried in a small town in eastern Texas.
It has to do with how patent trolls operate. Stay tuned for Troll Under the Bridge…
