Patent Reform, the first steps?

[Dravyk]

Web group backs Microsoft in patent suit

http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5098722.ht...ml?tag=nefd_top

Here's the first part of the article:

A leading Internet standards-setting organization took the unusual step Tuesday of urging the director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate a software patent that the group says threatens the development of the World Wide Web.

The move by the World Wide Web Consortium puts the group squarely behind Microsoft in a patent-infringement lawsuit that the company is losing so far. A federal jury ruled against Microsoft in August and awarded $521 million to a former University of California researcher who holds the patent the Web consortium now wants revoked.

The Web group contends that the patent, based on work done by Michael Doyle, founder of Eolas Technologies in Chicago, while he was an adjunct professor at the University of California at San Francisco, was improperly granted. In a filing with the patent office, the Web consortium asserts that the ideas in the Eolas patent had previously been published as prior art, a legal term. That prior art was not considered when the patent was granted, or in the Microsoft trial, and thus the patent claims should be invalidated, the consortium contends.

In a long letter Tuesday, Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium director, who created the basic software standards for the Web, said the patent office should begin a review of the patent "to prevent substantial economic and technical damage to the operation of the World Wide Web."

... That last sentence could have been written about Acacia!

Hey Spike, JMM, Far-L ... Maybe someone should get together with the W3 on the Acacia issue right now. They might be in a sympathetic mood to support.