Eolas sues technology and retail giants

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 07 October 2009 04:20

Your IT - Home IT

On Tuesday October 6, Eolas gained patent number 7,599,985 (985), a continuation of the 906 patent. According to copmpany officials, the 985 patent describes how websites can add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques.

The company believes a variety of companies have infringed these patents in their web sites or products, and immediately took legal action.

The defendants in the case brought by Eolas include Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, CDW, Citigroup, eBay, PepsiCo subsidiary Frito-Lay, Go Daddy, Google, J.C. Penney, JPMorgan Chase, New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems (which is in the process of being acquired by Dell), Playboy Enterprises, Rent-A-Center, Staples, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Yahoo!, and Google subsidiary YouTube.

The case has been brought in the Eastern District of Texas, a venue regarded as being favourable to patent holders.

"We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources," said Michael Doyle, Eolas chairman and co-inventor of the patent.

"Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair," he added.

Clearly, Berners-Lee and others dispute that the innovation in question really was Eolas's.