Ethics Week 10 - Mar 30


Patents

Baase §4.7

Do patents help advance progress? or hinder it?

Patents are pretty clearly a market regulation with the sole goal of improving innovation in technology. Inventors don't "deserve" to profit from their ideas; we simply want to make sure they are motivated to continue. In other words, this is purely utilitarian.

Patents are intended to cover INVENTIONS rather than IDEAS. If you have an idea to sell hamburgers with salsa, or newspapers & beer together, or to create a website where people can post their own stuff, that's an IDEA. It can't be protected: everyone else is entitled to copy it freely.

What do these have to do with computers? There are several issues about whether the patent system for software in fact helps anyone, and whether software patents fulfill their constitutional mandate to benefit society as a whole. These relate to the situation where patents are dealt with only by serious developers.

Currently in the US, patents last 20 years, and generally cannot be renewed or extended (but see below regarding pharmaceutical patents). During that period, the patent owner can enforce their patent, but patent litigation is relatively expensive. Formerly US patents lasted 17 years from the date of granting, but to comply with the WTO treaty on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) the term was changed to 20 years from application.

There is also an analogue to the copyright situation, where individuals can download software that may violate patents in some countries. This creates a situation somewhat related to file-sharing: end-users make the decision. Unlike file-sharing, there is no group analogous to the RIAA that is going after infringers.

Look at ubuntu software installation? What about MP3 players?

Some patent papers

These are assigned reading

Simpson Garfinkel, Patently Absurd, 1993
GARFINKEL, SIMSON
Garfinkel's article is pretty easy reading, pointing out some problems with software patents specifically.

Richard Stallman on PatentsSee full size image, 2002




Stallman is against software patents, of course. However, his case is better than many open-source-related arguments; in fact, it is squarely aligned with the interests of software-development businesses.

Paul Graham, a computer scientist and one of the partners of the venture-capital firm Y Combinator, wrote a 2006 essay Are Software Patents Evil?

Graham makes the following claim early on:

One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general. Gradually our machines consist more and more of software. Things that used to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures. There's nothing special about physical embodiments of control systems that should make them patentable, and the software equivalent not.

Is this true?

Does it matter that Graham is also a radical proponent of using the lisp programming language?

Graham also says,

Frankly, it surprises me how small a role patents play in the software business. It's kind of ironic, considering all the dire things experts say about software patents stifling innovation, but when one looks closely at the software business, the most striking thing is how little patents seem to matter.

But that paragraph is about software companies being sued by other software companies, and not "patent trolls".

Graham also makes some other claims, in particular some about the role of the patent system in business competition generally. Check out what he says about Reveal.



Finally, here's a student project from Stanford, dated 2000:
http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-99-00/software-patents
The authors are Carr, Gray, Watkins and Yang, and the patents they consider in depth are

Paul Heckel, Debunking the Software Patent Myth, Communications of the ACM, 1992
I've put this ACM paper on Blackboard, under Course Documents. The direct link is https://blackboard.luc.edu/@@2FAA2BAEC6905C51E89472016569D06A/courses/1/COMP_317_001_9489_102/content/_962406_1/heckel_patent.pdf

Heckel qualifies as a small software inventor who has recovered some of the costs of investment by using the patent system. On the first page he quotes the League of Programming Freedom as saying, "Scrolling and subwindows are well-known techniques, but combining them is apparently illegal." Heckel continues,

The League calls this an "outrageous result." Based on this description alone, any reasonable person would have to agree.

But I am that inventor, and Apple was actually sued on a prior related patent, 4,486,857. Because my patents were misrepresented, I researched the other patents described in the League's article and am reporting my results.

He then looks at a number of alleged cases of "patent abuse" and finds them wanting.

My (former) three-part test on when it is appropriate to recognize software patents:

  1. The Supreme Court has turned down your last appeal
  2. Federal marshals surround your cabin in the woods
  3. You are out of ammo
This marks me in some circles as a software-patent moderate.

35 U.S.C. §101 (patent-eligibility law):

Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.

The meaning of "process" is critical here: does it mean any procedure or method? Or does it mean "industrial process"? Historically, it pretty clearly was intended to mean the latter.

Pharmaceutical patents

Pharmaceutical patents are sort of the poster child for Why Patents Are Good For Us. Here the patent system IS effective at encouraging investment:

One weirdness: patents "for the use of"; someone can, if drug X is in the public domain, patent the use of X to treat disease Y (this must be in some legal sense a "new" use of X).

In practice this is not much of a problem, because generic manufacturers can still make and market X for its old purpose, and doctors can prescribe it for its new purpose. Such prescriptions are sometimes said to be "off-label"; they are an important way for drugs to get to people who will probably be helped by them, but for which no company has yet done clinical trials, and never will.

Some specific drugs:

cancer monoclonal-antibody drugs

These protein compoundss are antibodies that are highly specific to a certain substrate; they have very narrow targets. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer_chemotherapy:

Another branch in targeted therapy is the increasing use of monoclonal antibodies in cancer therapy. Although monoclonal antibodies (immune proteins which can be selected to precisely bind to almost any target) have been around for decades, they were derived from mice and did not function particularly well when administered to humans, causing allergic reactions and being rapidly removed from circulation. "Humanization" of these antibodies (genetically transforming them to be as similar to a human antibody as possible) has allowed the creation of a new family of highly effective humanized monoclonal antibodies. Rituximab, a drug used to treat lymphomas, is a prime example. -- Wikipedia

The point is that some cancers can be specifically targeted by certain antibodies, because they have specific antibody receptors not present in non-cancerous cells. The receptors involved tend to be very idiosyncratic.

None of these drugs would exist in the US marketplace if it were not for pharmaceutical patents.

On the other hand, the US Food and Drug Administration, which regulates new drugs, is arguably a massive government intrusion into the free market. Why shouldn't patent law intrude as well?

imatinib/gleevec: leukemias, stomach cancers. It is used to treat cancers where the cells involved have a specific receptor. Time magazine called it the "magic bullet against cancer" in 2001, when it was approved, though that was an overbroad assessment. It was also the subject of a patent lawsuit in India in 2007; the case was referred by the Madras High Court to the WTO.

It is the first member of a new class of agents that act by inhibiting particular tyrosine kinase enzymes, instead of non-specifically inhibiting rapidly dividing cells. -- Wikipedia

rituximab/rituxan: binds to the WBC surface protein CD20. Used to treat leukemias/lymphonmas, also some autoimmune diseases such as lupus

cetuximab/erbitux: metastatic colorectal cancer, head&neck cancers. Binds to EGFR receptor; it is an EGFR-inhibitor.

trastuzumab/herceptin: breast cancer. Monoclonal antibody that interferes with HER2/neu receptor. In some breast cancers, the HER2 receptor is, as wikipedia put it, "stuck in the 'on' position".

Antibiotics
nobody makes these, actually. The FDA requires not just proof of effectiveness, but proof that the infection that was cured was in fact resistant to existing antibiotics. This makes clinical trials very expensive.

Protein pump inhibitors (PPIs): used for various stomach-acid problems, including ulcers
omeprazole/prilosec
lansoprazole/prevacid
esomeprazol/nexium

HIV: protease inhibitors moved HIV from a short-term acute illness to a long-term chronic illness. This made drug development profitable again. When AZT (one of the first effective anti-HIV drugs) was first applied in the early 1990's to HIV patients, though, it was an off-label use.

red/white-blood cell drugs:
    filGRAStim/neupogen       makes more neutrophils/other WBCs. Used for cancer/chemo/BMT patients
    erythropoietin          makes more RBCs: kidney disease, cancer, cancer treatment

diabetes
    exENatide/byetta: this often means the patient can avoid taking insulin. It is offcially for type-2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetes. From byetta.com: Byetta may also be used for other purposes not listed in this medication guide.

In 1984, Congress passed the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act, also known as the Hatch-Waxman Act. This allowed generic drug makers to use a patented drug in their own FDA application, so that approval would be in place as soon as the original patent expired (normally after 20 years). However, it also gave pharmaceutical developers a chance at a patent extension for up to five extra years, subject to the following:

The idea here is that if it took a company fifteen years to bring a drug from discovery (and patent) to market, they will get ten years of patent-protected sales to recoup their investment rather than five.

Third-world issues with pharma patents

Basically, if a country is too poor to afford to treat all its citizens with a new drug, many may die. This has definitely been the case with some HIV drugs. As a result, the Third World has long argued that it should be exempt from pharmaceutical patents.

In the mid-1990's, the WTO basically agreed, and allowed (I'm not sure of the exact terms) third-world countries to manufacture generic equivalents of first-world drugs for use within their own borders only. The manufacturing must be for the government's own use (eg in distributing to its people; the manufacturing can't be a for-profit initiative of a private company in that country). Also, a good-faith attempt must have been made first to negotiate for a reduced-rate license to manufacture the drug, and such profits as are made must be given to the patent holder. In practice, large US pharmaceutical companies often enter into vastly-reduced-price licensing arrangements with third-world companies.

In 2005, the WTO relaxed this rule to allow poorer nations to import generics that would otherwise be covered by a patent. This is sometimes described as a "compulsory license". The manufacturer would not be prosecuted.

This is perhaps the foremost third-world patent issue.


Patents Generally

The fundamental justification for patents is to encourage advances in technology. Their justification is purely utilitarian; it is difficult to give a deontological rationale for not using someone else's invention.

Ethically, the scope of the utilitarian argument can be worldwide, but national patent laws are generally intended for national benefit. That said, treaties have led to fairly uniform patent laws in the industrialized world, but there are serious concerns in the Third World about certain aspects of patent law.

Also, a part of the patent process is the requirement that the inventor disclose the idea to the world. You cannot protect something with both a patent and trade secrecy. To put it another way, the patent grants you a limited monopoly in "exchange" for publication.

Software Patents

Why are they even controversial? Here are four categories of software-patent issues: One example of a fundamental problem might be that algorithms are can be seen as mathematical facts, not inventions.

As we consider the patents below, it will often be claimed that the innovation is "obvious". In fact, there is sometimes evidence that the idea was so obvious that prior publication (required to invalidate a patent based on "prior art") would have been absurd.

Part of the problem, with aspects unique to computing, is that any invention has two parts:
In the physical world, the second often tends to be the much harder component. But in the software world, once you realize you have a need to do something, working out an implementation (at least at the "invention" stage) is often very straightforward. Not always, but often. Once the need becomes apparent, finding a solution can be obvious.

What often seems to happen is that a patent is granted for an invention at a time when the inventor had no clear application for the idea. Much later, someone needed to get something done, and found a quick obvious solution that turned out to be the earlier patented one. The Eolas case (below) is a possible instance of this. Should early inventors be able to lock out later developers simply because they managed to patent a technique to solve a problem that was completely obvious later to anyone else faced with that same problem? Haven't they really patented the problem?

At the risk of being misleading about the term "obvious" as used in patent law, I will call this the "obvious-in-context" problem.


Aeroplane Control

A classic "broad" patent is the Wright brothers patent on "wing-warping" to control flight (to the Wrights, the wings were the "aero-planes", planing the air, the rest of it was the "flying machine"). The Wright brothers actually twisted the whole biplane structure -- using cables -- to bank in a turn. This later led to the development by others of ailerons, which achieve the same effect but which mechanically are entirely different. A court ruled the Wright patent still applied: what mattered was the concept of adjusting wing angles to tilt the craft.

This is a classic "broad patent" for a major new innovation. The courts have traditionally recognized "broad" patents, but somehow in software this distinction is often lost.

History of software patents

For a long time, software was held to be unpatentable, as mathematical algorithms are unpatentable. Any fundamental mathematical or physical laws are unpatentable.

1972: Gottschalk v Benson (wikipedia): You can't patent a mathematical algorithm (in this case a number-format-conversion algorithm). More below.

1973: ATT somehow manages to patent the setuid bit, claiming it's hardware. This patent was dedicated to the public domain in 1979. This patent is certainly a deep idea: if a certain bit is set in the filesystem information node for a file (not in the file itself), then when the file is executed, it runs with the privileges of its owner and not the user. Before then (and after; see what Windows does), there were complex ad-hoc methods for running selected programs with elevated (or alternative) privileges.

1981: Diamond v Diehr: computer + machine IS patentable. For a long time after, software patents always described the software in combination with some hardware device. This patent dealt with the curing of rubber, using a computer to guide the process.

Diamond v Diehr: SCOTUS says that an invention isn't automatically unpatentable just because it contains an algorithm But PTO & lower courts read in the converse: algorithms are patentable

Note that the current business-world baseline thus rests on USPTO policy and lower-court case law, NOT congress or SCOTUS.

Problem of "non-obviousness" the rules state that it's not enough to prove it's obvious today. Uh oh. That becomes an extremely difficult burden.

To be patentable, an invention must be "novel". Novelty is usually challenged by the presentation of "prior art": did someone else discover it first? Often there are arguments about this.

If prior art is published, it can invalidate a patent. However, if it was used privately, those users can continue to use their idea without paying royalties to the owner of the patent, but the patent may still stand. The patent can be challenged on the grounds of not being novel, but this is harder.

Broad patents for fundamental new ideas, narrow patents for improvements

compatibility issues: What if the default, standard implementation is patented? Two cases where there was at least some movement away from a patented format:

    GIF => PNG
    MP3 => ogg vorbis

software patent v copyright

Supreme-court cases limit the word "process" in USC Title 35, Chapter 10, §101:

Inventions Patentable: Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.


Gottschalk v Benson continues to be debated. (Gottschalk is the name of the patent commissioner; the one-word name for the case is Benson.) The court stated that "the patent would wholly pre-empt the mathematical formula and in practical effect would be a patent on the algorithm itself". But that is not entirely clear. The algorithm was for converting so-called binary-coded decimal (in which decimal digits are represented in sequence each by four binary digits, so 157 = 0001 0101 0111) to true binary. The patent was for the use of this algorithm on a computer, not universally (though the algorithm makes no sense except on a computer).

In the decision, the court cited an earlier decision: "[w]hile a scientific truth, or the mathematical expression of it, is not a patentable invention, a novel and useful structure created with the aid of knowledge of scientific truth may be", and "an idea of itself is not patentable." The court also said,

Here the "process" claim is so abstract and sweeping as to cover both known and unknown uses of the BCD to pure binary conversion. The end use may (1) vary from the operation of a train to verification of drivers' licenses to researching the law books for precedents and (2) be performed through any existing machinery or future-devised machinery or without any apparatus.

Applications of computer algorithms may indeed be general. In retrospect, should this be an issue? The end-uses above are all for software using the algorithm; and anyone could always use a different algorithm.

One school of thought is that a "process" is not patentable unless there is a physical transformation involved, or unless the new invention is necessary in carrying out the process. The Supreme Court's Benson ruling was narrower than that, however. However, the court did say

transformation and reduction of an article 'to a different state or thing' is the clue to the patentability of a process claim that does not include particular machines. [emphasis by pld]

The decision closes with an observation that lack of patentability doesn't seem to have hurt the 1972 software industry any, and a call to Congress to figure it out (which may have had its origins in an amicus curiae brief filed by IBM, which was at the time against software patents):
If these programs are to be patentable,  considerable problems are raised which only committees of Congress can manage, for broad powers of investigation are needed, including hearings which canvass the wide variety of views which those operating in this field entertain. The technological problems tendered in the many briefs before us indicate to us that considered action by the Congress is needed.

In the 1980 Supreme Court decision Diamond v Chakrabarty, about the patentability of genetically modified organisms, the following line from a 1952 Congress report on patent law is cited

    anything under the sun that is made by man [is patentable]

How does this square with Benson?

The Benson decision is frequently cited as evidence that the Supreme Court did not intend to allow software patents; the language of the decision -- that the algorithm was a fundamental mathematical fact -- can be read as supporting this. Others use Benson as an example of a case that, with the benefit of hindsight, seems more and more strongly to have been wrongly decided; that in patenting an algorithm on a computer, one is not patenting a mathematical idea. Or, at the very least, Congress should simply heed the Court's call to address this issue directly. It doesn't help any that the court seems to have misunderstood the concept of widely varying applications.


Reading original patent descriptions

You can look them up online. Follow uspto.gov -> patents -> patft (uspto.gov/patft). Or go directly to the search-by-patent-number page:
      http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm

Some software patents

Here's an interesting list of some software patents, supposedly "random" though some particularly famous ones are sprinkled in:
    http://bat8.inria.fr/~lang/hotlist/free/licence/patents.html

Another list can be found at: http://www.textfiles.com/law/softpat.txt

xor cursor, patent 4197590 (below)
Method for dynamically viewing image elements stored in a random access memory array

cpu Stack Pointer register, patent 3794980, to George Cogar, 1971. Supposedly, though I can't find the source, this was purchased by DEC [?] and eventually placed in the public domain. Or not enforced. Or, possibly, it was in fact licensed by Intel/motorola/everyone_else.

ATT setuid-bit patent, # 4135240, invented by Dennis Ritchie, applied for in 1972 and later placed by AT&T in the public domain.

Using an xml document to describe the grammar of another xml document (Part of Scientigo's patent suite on xml)

British Telecom patent on the hyperlink, files 1976, granted 1989. Patent number 4,873,662. In 2000 they attempted to sue a large number of websites. The patent itself apparently refers to a system in which multiple remote users can access "blocks" of data on a central computer.

Altavista patents on "web searching". Altavista did have several such patents on basic web "crawling". Most were predated by the "archie" archive-searcher for ftp sites, developed by Alan Emtage in 1989. Altavista was purchased by CMGI, which some claim is a patent troll.


RSA encryption: patent 4405829

Choose primes p and q.
Reveal n=pq
Find e and d so x^(ed) = x mod n (this is not hard) Common values for e: 3, 5, 17, 257, 65537
(n,e) is the public key, d is the private key

RSA uses standard high-precision arithmetic in its calculations; the underlying number theory has been well-known for centuries. The patent was for the APPLICATION of these standard methods to encryption. That application was certainly novel.

The RSA patents finally expired, after much controversy. Part of that controversy was self-induced; the patent owner at one point appeared to grant a general license for noncommercial use, but then backed away from that.


Compton 1989 patent on multimedia, despite Apple Hypercard in ~1987.

Steir's patent 5,060,171 on artificially adding hair to a person's image [Garfinkel article]

Eolas v Microsoft: About a way for running "applets" in a browser window. See below.

NTP v RIM: the blackberry patent

mp3: lots of development went into this

Lempel-Ziv / LZW compression, patents 4464650 [?], 4558302

This is the compression scheme in GIF file formats. The gif format was developed by CompuServe in 1987. A year later, they noticed that the algorithm was patented, and that the patent was currently held by Unisys. Allegedly, Unisys told Compuserve at that time that they would not need to pay royalties.

In 1999, Unisys demanded that some noncommercial websites pay a $5000 fee for hosting files in the gif format (an interesting strategy, given that the sites were not themselves rendering the images). Some commercial sites were asked for even more. It's not clear whether anyone paid it; most affected sites rapidly switched to .jpeg or .png. Some observers were especially offended by the fact that Unisys allowed the use of the GIF format as a free standard until it became well-established, and then demanded fees.

There's some question as to whether this was the only or even the dominant reason for the shift to PNG format; the latter does offer more features (especially alpha and gamma) than GIF, and is a lossless format unlike JPEG.

Natural-order recalculation in spreadsheets:
More below.

Cell A depends on B if A needs B's value in its formula
Rule: Before calculating A, calculate all cells A depends on.
Duh.
The algorithm is called "topological sort"; published in the CS literature in 1963.

Rene K. Pardo and Remy Landau filed for a patent in 1971: U.S. Patent 4,398,249. This was an important case in allowing software patents (initially their request was denied as an "algorithm")

Spreadsheets were a brilliant idea (Dan Bricklin, VisiCalc?), but not order of recalculation.

MS has patented the FAT disk format. Here is a summary of the events from the Public Patent Foundation, which had challenged that patent:

In April 2004, the Public Patent Foundation filed a formal request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to revoke Microsoft Corporation's patent on the FAT File System, touted by Microsoft as being "the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers, and, since the advent of inexpensive, removable flash memory, also between digital devices." In its filing, PUBPAT submitted previously unseen prior art showing the patent, which issued in November 1996 and is not otherwise due to expire until 2013, was obvious and, as such, should have never been granted. The PTO granted PUBPAT's request in June 2004 and provisionally rejected the patent in September 2004. In response to the rejection, Microsoft made amendments to the patent's claims. The PTO proceeded to allow the amended form of the patent. PUBPAT had no right to appeal that decision.

The fact that PubPat can't appeal or even respond to the decision is a serious due-process issue. If you are sued by Microsoft for using the FAT format, you will be allowed to respond to Microsoft's post-2004 amendments to the patent claims. But you will probably not.

Microsoft is now actively licensing the format to flash-card manufacturers. Why not switch to the free ext2 filesystem? Because that just is impossible, that's why.

It is unclear which patents Microsoft is most interested in pushing. While there are legitimate reasons for thinking that FAT itself might not be patentable, Microsoft later introduced a strategy for supporting both long filenames and also "8.3" filenames (8 char name, 3 char extension). The patent that covers the dual-name strategyis less vulnerable to "obviousness" or "prior art" challenges.

Microsoft sued the TomTom people (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft-sues-tomtom-over-fat-patents-in-linux-based-device.ars), because TomToms, although they are based on linux, use the FAT filesystem internally. The suit was settled two months later, after TomTom agreed to cut the FAT.

FAT is a good example of an idea that is obvious to anyone presented with the problem of how to create a simple filesystem suitable for small devices. However, there is the added problem of it's being standard (although an unofficial one); you can't just implement a workaround.

A few compatibility issues where a patented file format (or file-creation algorithm) has led to a new non-patented standard:

GIF => PNG
MP3 => ogg vorbis

PTO (Patent & Trademark Office) problems:

ignorance is no defense: "submarine" patents
The entire process is secret: you can be making good-faith effort to be noninfringing and get hit with a huge verdict.

Infringement is considered willful if you had advance notice of infringing. Your belief that the patent was invalid is NOT a defense. Damages automatically triple.

Three groups of stakeholders:

Where do we fit in?

How large corporations manage:

small inventors:

Open source: voip

Legal advantage of small inventor: somewhat diminished with rise in legal fees & increased ambiguity

But small inventors can still sell to patent-holding companies.

Legal situation of large corporations:


Eolas v Microsoft

Patent 5838906: Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document, filed in 1994.

The alleged invention is about a way for running "applets" in a browser window. Is this really an "invention" at all?

Back in 1992, browsers just displayed images and static text. However, it was clear by then that applications could display content in windows created and "owned" by other applications; for example, MS Word could at that time display an Excel subwindow.

What was not foreseen was that browsers would become universal viewers of just about everything.

Microsoft v Eolas (+ Univ of California, as part of UCSF):
MS lost this case in 2004; was ordered to pay $521 million.  They then won the right to a new trial, but settled in 2007 before the beginning of the new trial.

Patent covers

a system allowing a user of a browser program ... to access and execute an embedded program object [or small computer program, often referred to as "applets" or "plug-ins"]

Patent filed 1994, granted 1998, USPTO review 2004, upheld 2005

See http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-99-00/software-patents/hypermedia.html

"Viola" prior art: may or may not be relevant: see http://www.viola.org

The Viola browser project was found by the district court to have been "abandoned", but the circuit court found that Viola version 1.0 was "abandoned" only in the sense that it was replaced with version 2.0.

Part of the technical issue was about the meaning of the term "executable application". The court allegedly gave this broad meaning. Microsoft claimed it only meant "standalone applications".

Eolas started by Michael Doyle, faculty member of UCSF. UC Berkeley is apparently the owner of the patent.

Doyle certainly had some early ideas, that came before Java applets.

Had the Eolas patent been more aggressively enforced, it would have been a huge impediment to the world-wide web.

2007: MS has claim they invented it; this loses in Sept, but Eolas & MS settle in August

October 2009: Eolas has launched a major lawsuit against just about everyone: press release. The list of defendants includes lots of sites that use web-embedded objects: amazon, apple, eBay, and youtube.

View 1: Eolas developed some early web-embedding technology, and got really lucky
View 2: Eolas patented Microsoft's 1990 Object Linking and Embedding idea, and got a 20-year license to fleece us
View 3: Eolas may control a "critical" piece of the web standards.

We will return to this in a bit.