Tongo's Blog

Winners..almost

The USPTO has revoked MercExchange's patent on the 'Buy it Now' feature. Ebay was sued for infringement by MercExchange and was ordered to pay damages but no mention was made about an injunction as far as Ebay continued use of the feature. The case is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. As in the case of RIM vs NTP, the USPTO has struck down the patent behind the whole case since it is a 'common' feature. Whether that makes any difference in the Ebay case, who knows.

Losers..sort of

Microsoft lost its own patent fight against Eolas a while ago over its use of interactive content with ActiveX. They have now announced that the next updates on April 11 will carry changes to Internet Explorer that might prove a little annoying to a lot of users and a pain to developers. For interactive content, you will now need to click on the content and then click on a popup notification before you can interact with the embedded content. Just one more click for you before you can start playing your flash game. There are work-arounds already posted on Microsoft's website and other sites.
The real losers in this one would be the few(hopefully) developers who have a lot of content that needs to be updated to work under these conditions. I feel your pain my friends.