As we reported just yesterday, Eolas has lost two of three legal disputes with Microsoft over it"s patent and licensing claims. Eolas now claims the fight is far from over and has mailed an "office action" to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Eolas says the patent office had wrongfully withdrawn 10 of it"s previous claims, including a previous finding from February. Eolas attorney Martin Lueck, of Minneapolis-based Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi LLP, said the patent office examiner had issued a new action—based on yet another piece of "prior art"—to reject the patent"s claims. The prior-art piece was outside the examples offered by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), which brought the prior-art question to the attention of the patent office in November 2003.
"Eolas is attacking HTML itself. This goes to our heart," W3C CEO Steve Bratt said. "The patent could force Web site owners to modify their pages and server-side applications."