Eolas Technologies filed a lawsuit Tuesday charging 22 companies with infringing on two key patents governing advanced web browsing technology. The high-profile defendants include Internet giants Adobe Systems, Amazon.com, Apple, eBay, Google and Sun Microsystems.
According to Eolas — an acronym for “embedded objects linked across systems” — the patent awarded to the company in 1998 enabled browsers to act as platforms for interactive embedded web applications. Today this advanced browser technology provides rich interactive online experiences for more than a billion web users worldwide, the company said.
“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 Eolas Chairman Michael Doyle. “Profiting from someone else’s innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what’s fair.”
Embedded Apps in the Spotlight
The technology that Eolas said it first demonstrated in 1993 — and for which it received a U.S. patent in 1998 — concerns a “distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking an external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document.” The bad news for the defendants is that this patent has already passed two separate re-examinations at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, with the most recent concluded in February.
A court dispute over the Eolas patent resulted in a $565 million federal court judgment against Microsoft in 2004 that was partially overturned on appeal the following year. Though a new trial was scheduled in 2007, Microsoft and Eolas settled privately under undisclosed financial terms. Eolas later told its shareholders that it expected to pay a substantial dividend as a result of the settlement.
The second patent for which Eolas is claiming infringement, and which the company says is a continuation of its initial patent filing,…