The Regents of the University of California and its lawsuit-happy patent licensee Eolas Technologies yesterday filed lawsuits against Facebook, Disney and Wal-Mart over four interactive technology patents they believe the companies are infringing.
Reuters reported the lawsuits earlier today, but we’ve embedded the court documents for the Facebook case below for your perusal.
The four patents in question were issued to the university and subsequently licensed to Eolas, a Texas company and oft-called ‘patent troll’ chaired by Dr. Michael D. Doyle, formerly Director for the Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California (San Francisco).
These are the patents-in-suit:
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– 7,599,985:
“Distributed hypermedia method and system for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”
– 5,838,906:
“Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”
– 8,082,293:
“Distributed hypermedia method and system for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”
– 8,086,662:
“Distributed hypermedia method and system for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”
As Reuters points out, Eolas Technologies was founded specifically to assist the University of California in monetizing patented technology.
Eolas says the ‘906 Patent, which was granted the in November 1998, embodies technology that enabled Web browsers for the first time to act as platforms for fully interactive embedded applications.
The patents are the subject of many a controversy, with even WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee stating in the past that Eolas’ claims are ridiculous and the patents should be tossed out “due to tremendous amounts of prior art”.
The patent was the subject of prior litigation against Microsoft that resulted in a 2004 federal judgment of more than $565 million in favor of Eolas. The parties settled the legal dispute for an undisclosed amount in 2007.
However, two of the patents cited in the new lawsuits were declared invalid in February 2012 by a Texas jury in a separate lawsuit, which targeted Amazon, Apple, Google, Yahoo and others.
At the time, Wired headlines its report on the invalidation thusly: “Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Troll’s Claim to Own the Interactive Web”.
Facebook has responded to the lawsuit with the traditional “we’ll fight it vigorously” in a statement to Reuters. Courts docs below.
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