[OT] browser plugin patents - warning!

[Edwin Gore]

What is REALLY irritating is that prior art on this is SOOOO bloody obvious.

Anybody ever hear of an operating system? It's this basic framework that you can seamlessly extend with these doodads called applications and drivers.

This is, possibly, even worse than some of Amazon's patents. Some of the slash-dottys are all "Oooooh! They are going after microsoft and say they aren't interested in Opera, or Mozilla". Yes, but unlike trademark infringement, these clowns could let opera and mozilla infringe all they want, for as long as they want, and then in 10 years sue them, and they can even say that Opera and Mozilla KNEW they were infringing because of the microsoft case, and therefore need to be punished even more. Basically, if this thing is allowed to stand, it's going to be very, very bad for the internet..,and maybe other things too. 

Plus, it's a stupid "Here is a broad methodology that could be used to achieve an end" patent with no specific implementation attached, discussed, or apparently, even attempted. They just sat down and said - hey! If OLE 2.0 can do this in a word document, we could patent the idea of doing it in a web browser! I mean really - a single patent that covers both Netscape plug-ins and Active X and Java, all of which work COMPLETELY differently? That's a bad patent.

>----- ------- Original Message ------- -----
>From: Mark Brownell <gizmotron at earthlink.net>
>To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>Sent: Fri, 12 Sep 2003 13:36:30
>
>
>On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 12:26  PM, Alex
>Rice wrote:
>
>> If this is as bad as it sounds, soon lots of
>irate web developers will 
>> be flocking to Revolution and other web-aware app
>development 
>> environments.
>>
>> 2  September 2003  ::: 10 am edt
>> IE, Flash, and patents: here comes trouble
>> <http://www.zeldman.com/>
>
>Alex,
>
>Now I want to use my entire library of
>foul-language words. So we have 
>the browser's version of SCO to watch out for.
>Could this spread to 
>standalone apps and application developers that use
>Quicktime to 
>display rich media?
>
>Thanks for the heads-up.
>
>Mark
>
>_______________________________________________
>use-revolution mailing list
>use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolu
>tion