Excellent news for the web! Now we need to go back revisit the pantent granting process and get examiners to outright reject patents that are either obvious, vague or duplicate ideas that have already been produced.

Reshared post from +Tim O’Reilly

It's so great to see the Eolas patent struck down. We had firsthand knowledge of this case at O'Reilly, since +Dale Dougherty and +Pei Wei, who worked with us on GNN back in 1992 and 1993, have testified repeatedly in this trial over the past decade or more. Pei's work with Viola (see http://viola.org) was clearly prior art, but it took till now for the court system to catch up with that obvious fact.

The current patent system is a terrible tax on invention, as it requires real inventors to spend time in court rather than focusing on making real things happen. We must remember that the patent system was supposed to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," not to enrich people who know how to work the legal system.

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Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Troll’s Claim to Own the Interactive Web
TYLER, Texas — After threatening web companies for more than a decade, Michael Doyle and his patent-holding company Eolas Technologies — …

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