Michael Doyle is the CEO of Eolas and he, along with David Martin and Cheong Ang, have this patent under their name but owned by The Regents of the University of California.

U.S. Patent 5,838,906

They filed for the patent in 1994 and this patent covers use of any embedded program objects, or applets within Web documents, and any computer program product for use in a system comprising of at least one client workstation and one network server. The patent also covers any algorithm that implements dynamic, bi-directional communications between Web browsers and external applications.

Under the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, Eolas Technologies, claims Microsoftâs products, including Internet Explorer, Windows 95, and Windows 98, infringe their patent that makes it possible to embed applets, such as Microsoftâs ActiveX capabilities, into a web page. Eolas is suing for Microsoft to cease all manufacture, use and sale of those products (Eolas Technologies v. Microsoft Corp., N.D. III., No. 99 C 0626).

Eolasâ lawsuit seems quite predatory going after Microsoft only because right now every web browser currently supports embedded applets, and therefore every web browser is in violation of the Eolas patent. It is interesting to note that neither Netscape nor Sun, whose competing browser and Java products infringe on the patent, were included in the lawsuit.

Here is a Timeline of important developments:
1991 - Sun began working on Java
1993 - Mosaic, the browser Internet Explorer was based on, released
October 17, 1994 - Patent 5,838,906 filed
1995 - Java made public
November 17, 1998 - Patent 5,838,906 made public

According to Robert Cringely of www.pbs.org, Patent law is intended to encourage the development of intellectual property by granting to its developer a time-limited monopoly on the use of that property. Antitrust law is intended to protect the public against illegal monopolies. But a patent is a legal monopoly and apparently exempt from antitrust control. Even further, the government cannot induce infringement of a U.S. patent even if it is to correct an antitrust problem.

The lawsuit set Microsoft on a search for prior art of embedded programs. This search produced Viola. Viola is the first graphical web browser created by Pei Wei. He developed Viola at the Experimental Computing Facility (XCF) at the University of California Berkeley.

In May 1993, Pei had created a demo that showed how he could control another application inside his browser. He used an applet embedded in a web page that contained controls that communicated with a program. The controls in the web browser sent messages back and forth between the program. Pei showed this demo to people in Sun from Oak project, which started in the Nomadic group, and later became Java. Not only did he show them his demo, but also he gave the Sun representatives a copy of the Viola source code to take back and compile. Pei's work is an example of how Doyle was not the only group working on embedded hypermedia at that time.

Eolas' planned rates were royalty-free licenses for individual and academic users, 50 cents per piece of software for heavy commercial users (on the order of 1 million units), and up to $5 per unit for more limited commercial usage.

As Dale Dougherty, a colleague of Pei's, says in one article, Pei and I agreed to provide information to Microsoft to help fight this software patent. It is ironic that while Microsoft fights one patent, they also hold a patent on stylesheets used on the Web. Viola, which used stylesheets in its browser, could be used to fight the Microsoft patent. This just points out how silly the whole business of patents really is.

Pei could have easily patented Viola but instead decided to give his source code to Sun, which is probably also where they got the ideas, and not necessarily from the demo by Doyle. Many have asked him why he gave his code away but that was just how he works, by sharing and learning. Regardless, the old e-mails and Viola used as an example of prior art should help Microsoft's case immensely.