Eolas Attorney Confident Over Patent Re-Examination

by Glen Shapiro, LawAndTax-News.com, New York

17 November 2003

Despite the US Patent and Trademark Office's recent decision to order a re-examination of Patent No. 5,838,906, granted to the University of California and Eolas Technologies for technology which allows web browsers to access external applications, the firm's attorney, Martin Lueck announced last week that he remains confident of a positive outcome for Eolas.

In the order for re-examination, initiated on October 30, the USPTO explained that:

"A substantial outcry from a widespread segment of the affected industry has essentially raised a question of patentability with repect to the 906 claims. This creates an extraordinary situation for which a director-ordered examination is an appropriate remedy."

Speaking to the US technology media last week, Mr Lueck suggested that claims of prior art invalidating the patent which were made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are unlikely to prove effective:

"When the patent examiner gets into the file history and compares the art to what was already considered, they will find out that they were right the first time," he observed, adding that he does not expect the USPTO re-examination to affect the firm's patent infringement dispute with Microsoft, as many of the claims made with regard to the former have already been considered by the courts.

University of California spokesman, Trey Davis supported this assertion, explaining to the eWeek news service that:

"The same arguments that would have applied in the court's review of this issue would hold for the evidence that this new request involved."

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