US appeals court swats Eolas web patents
Google and Amazon are celebrating after the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that two controversial patents owned by licensing company Eolas are invalid.
The patents, owned by former University of California researcher Michael Doyle, covered basic interactive functions of the web, such as playing videos or rotating images.
A year after obtaining the first patent in 1998, Doyle sued Microsoft for infringement, with a jury finding in favour of Eolas in 2003. Amid an appeals process following the ruling, the companies settled for more than $100 million in 2007.
The second patent was granted in 2009, prompting Eolas, later joined by the University of California – which licensed the patents to Doyle’s company – to sue more than a dozen companies including Amazon, Apple, Google and Yahoo for infringing both patents.
The suit led high-profile Internet figures such as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web, to testify against Eolas in court and argue that the patents would be detrimental to web users.
After a four day trial, a jury at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas invalidated the patents in February 2012.
But some of the defendants, including Oracle and JPMorgan Chase, had already settled with Eolas before the ruling.
Eolas appealed against the decision, which was upheld on July 22 by Judges Newman, Bryson and Prost at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in a one-word order.
Court documents show that Google, Amazon and US retailer JC Penney were the remaining companies in the litigation.
The decision brings “relief to large sections of the hi-tech industry and online community", said Ian Wood, partner at Charles Russell LLP.
He added: “The impact of the decision cannot be played down. Tim Berners-Lee testified that if Eolas’ patent claims were upheld it would ‘substantially impair the usability of the web’. Or, to put it another way, Eolas could have made a considerable amount of money from those wishing to retain the usability of the web.”
In a number of pending cases, Eolas has alleged that several companies have infringed the now invalidated patents.
Wood said: “This decision should effectively end Eolas’ lawsuits against companies including Yahoo, Google and many online retailers where Eolas’ claims ran to hundreds of millions of dollars.”
There is “no doubt” that companies like Microsoft that previously settled with Eolas will try to recover licensing money they have paid, he added.
Neither Eolas nor lawyers for Amazon, Google or JC Penney responded to requests for comment.
