The company Eolas Technologies has filed a lawsuit against Adobe. The lawsuit is about two patents which, according to the company, give them exclusive right to such key technologies for the internet as embedded applications / browser plug-ins and programming techniques associated with asynchronous Javascript and XML.
At the court hearing, Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee demonstrated that the technologies for embedding programmable, dynamic content into Web pages already existed at the time when Eolas had made its patent application. In particular, the original work was about an experimental browser with advanced features called Viola (created by Pei-Yuan Wei).
Unfortunately, after having won a huge financial settlement with Microsoft Corporation (rumoured to be about US $31M), Eolas now had sufficient financial resources to effectively begin what is called ‘patent trolling’. This is the practice of seeking out and initiating lawsuits against large technology firms, claiming patent infringement. This can be sort of a gamble where two results may ensue: the company being sued sticks it out for the duration—perhaps years–and in the end either wins or loses based upon sufficient evidence and credibility to the court, or the company being litigated against decides to avoid the cost of an ongoing legal battle by negotiating a settlement with Eolas instead (as Microsoft had done).
In their patent infringement case against Adobe, Eolas Technologies lost. The eight-person jury took merely several hours to establish that the Eolas claim to own exclusive technologies enabling interactive access to Web sites was void of merit. This has serious repercussions to Eolas. As a direct result of this decision, three issues related to the patent infringement cases they had launched against Adobe, Google, Yahoo and others have been removed from the equation, drastically reducing (if not eliminating) the amount of compensation they might have otherwise been granted from these companies and others named in their patent infringement suits.