In this issue

The web community is bemused, bewildered and flabbergasted that bit-player Eolas Technologies has successfully sued Microsoft for half a billion dollars.  The judgment could affect anyone who has Flash on their web pages so listen up!

The law suite was about Embedded content.  This covers things like Flash movies, streamed video that appears on a page (not in a stand-alone player), 360^o pictures, Java applets and so on.  

Back in the early days of the Internet, the University of California patented technology to embed content such as this in web pages.  They licensed it to Eolas Technology, basically Mark Doyle - a former University of California researcher.  Eolas Technologies have now popped up and successfully claimed that Microsoft violated the patent.  

What happens now?

Microsoft has two choices, appeal or agree to a licensing deal with Eola technologies. 

Eolas would (I guess) prefer a licensing deal because they could lose the appeal.  They have suggested that they would be happy to resolve the case on a 'reasonable basis', which presumably means less than $500million. 

Microsoft has appealed, probably thinking they will win.    However as a contingency Microsoft is implementing a new version of Internet Explorer that doesn't violate the patent.  This is due out early next year.  The effect of the workaround is that any time anyone has embedded content on a page (including possibly Flash) they may get a little dialog box asking them to confirm that they want to play the media. 

That could get quite annoying quite quickly.  It is fairly easy to recode the page to avoid the popup box.  Macromedia discusses the problem and has identified a workaround and Microsoft discusses the problem and workarounds here.

The organisation that controls web standards, W3C, is alarmed by the effect of the various workarounds on standards.  W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee said the change "will cause cascades of incompatibility to ripple through the Web,"

Breaking news

Oct 8th, Eolas Technologies files a motion to enjoin Microsoft from distributing current versions of Internet Explorer.  However Microsoft can appeal the injunction presumably banking on keeping the case tied up until the workaround is in place.

Oct 29th, The web standards body W3C makes a filing with the US patent office alleging that technology was around that pre-dated the patent. 

What do we have to do? 

I don't think you need to take panic action at this stage, but plan for something in early next year.

Check the Macromedia page and see whether your site (or any of your clients' sites) will be affected.  Macromedia are promising a tool to profile your pages to see if they will be affected.  If you are going to be affected, track the issue and at some point you will need to make a modification to the HTML. 

Keep up to date 

W3C has a mailing list going, archived here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-plugins/

Search news.com, or your favourate news site for Eolas news items from time to time.