Stefan Mileschin

Key patents at the centre of the world wide wibble are now safe from patent troll Eolas in what would have been the largest trademark payouts in history.

The Eolas patents were so threatening to the web that Sir Tim Berners-Lee appeared in court to take on the trolls in February 2012.

The entire case was heard in the East Texas city of Tyler, population 100,000, and was the result of Michael Doyle's attempt to levy a vast patent tax. The outcome was a major disappointment for Doyle. The jury invalidated his patents and this week an appeals court agreed.

In 1993, Doyle was the director of a computer lab at the University of California-San Francisco. He oversaw the creation of software that allowed doctors to view embryos online, and claimed it was the first "interactive" use of the world wide web. Doyle patented the idea in 1994.

He created a company called "Eolas", the Gaelic word for knowledge, but he never made a product that worked. Instead the company got rich off the back of settlements. In 1999, he filed a lawsuit claiming that Microsoft's Internet Explorer violated his patent on "interactive" features on the web.

He collected a $540 million jury verdict after appeals. Microsoft settled for $100 million.

But things did not go well in other ways. Eolas' original patent was denounced by the web's global standard-setting body in 2003 and there was a re-examination at the US Patent Office. Eolas's patent was not touched.

http://news.techeye.net/software/web...lly-vanquished