While this is not a patent-litigation blog, I’d like to briefly mention a significant development out of East Texas involving patent claims that purported to cover some basic interactive features of what the late Sen. Ted Stevens described as that “series of tubes”.  In a closely-watched patent-infringement trial, yesterday afternoon a federal jury in Tyler, Texas invalidated two patents — owned by the Regents of the University of California and licensed for purposes of infringement litigation to Eolas Technologies — covering the “interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”.

Eolas and the UC Regents filed suit in 2009 against Adobe Systems, Amazon.com, Google and others, alleging that defendants infringed U.S. Patent Nos. 5,838,906 (the “’906″) and 7,599,985 (the “’985″).  Plaintiffs claimed that the patents covered interactive Web pages and software that enables content to be interactively presented in or served to browsers through the use of embedded objects, including Adobe’s Flash and Shockwave, Apple’s QuickTime and Google’s Chrome for Windows.  According to a press release issued on behalf of McKool Smith, plaintiffs’ lead counsel, shortly after the suit was filed,

The ’906 Patent embodies technology first demonstrated publicly in 1993, enabling Web browsers for the first time to act as platforms for fully-interactive embedded applications.  This advanced browser technology provides rich interactive online experiences for more than a billion Web users worldwide.  . . .

. . .

The ’985 Patent is a continuation of the ’906 patent, and allows websites to add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques.  . . .

(A copy of plaintiffs’ initial complaint, filed in October 2009, is available here; their Corrected Third Amended Complaint for Patent Infringement, filed last October, is available here; and the Justia docket can be found here.)

Among their defenses, defendants argued that the asserted patent claims were invalid because they were anticipated and obvious.  The invalidity stage of the trial (infringement and, if necessary, damages proceedings would have followed, but for the jury’s invalidity verdict) saw testimony from Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, and Pei-Yuan Wei, who created an early Web browser called Viola cited by defendants as prior art to plaintiffs’ patents.  (Defendants’ Feb. 9, 2012 Opposition to Plaintiffs’ Motion for Judgment as A Matter of Law summarizes defendants’ view of the evidentiary support for their invalidity defenses.)

Over a dozen of the originally-named defendants settled before the jury returned its verdict of invalidity, some earlier in the case and several on the eve of the jury’s verdict.  GoDaddy, for example, joined plaintiffs in a joint motion to dismiss filed just yesterday “pursuant to . . . settlement agreements executed on February 8, 2012;” and the court entered an order on Feb. 7, 2012 granting a joint motion to dismiss filed by plaintiffs and Citigroup “pursuant to . . . settlement agreements effective as of February 6, 2012.”

Eolas sued Microsoft in 1999 on one of the same patents at issue in the East Texas litigation, U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906, and won a $521 million jury verdict in 2003 for Microsoft’s implementation of ActiveX controls in its browsers.  That verdict was overturned on appeal by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in part because the trial judge refused to let Microsoft present evidence about the Viola browser to challenge the validity of the ’906 patent, and Microsoft ultimately settled with Eolas in 2007.

For further reading, Joe Mullin of Wired’s Threat Level blog has covered the trial in detail here, here, here and here.