Monday April 27 1:18 PM EDT
Netscape fends off Wang suit
By Chris Oakes
SAN FRANCISCO (Wired) - Netscape is crying out for a little geek love.
Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) became the company's pipeline for soliciting a little technical assistance today. Netscape
hopes that the developers who normally use Mozilla.org to contribute free source code will provide help as it tries to fend off a
patent lawsuit filed against the company last October.
According to Netscape, Wang has charged the browser company with violating a 1985 Wang patent by incorporating certain
features in its browser, a patent which Netscape maintains is "noninfringed, unenforceable, and invalid."
Netscape posted an announcement of the suit on the front page of Mozilla.org, reasoning that developers have as much to lose
as the company from a successful suit. A Wang victory puts the source code at risk, so Netscape is asking for help to gather
technical evidence proving that Wang's patent has no validity.
According to Netscape officials, the suit charges the company with infringing on a patent that Wang holds for a videotext system
in the Netscape browser. The functions affected include those that save Web pages from a server, bookmarks, and decoding
documents based on the use of file extensions.
Netscape cites several patented technologies that predate the Wang patent and therefore invalidate it. Such patents are known
as "prior art," meaning they are similar enough to the new patent to invalidate claims by the inventor of uniqueness or originality.
Netscape's list of prior art relevant to the case includes the Alto and Star computers from Xerox Parc, terminal emulators, and
Telidon, Prestel, and Mupid, video-text systems used in the late '70s and early '80s.
One San Diego attorney specializing in Internet software patent protection said that Wang's suit was unlikely to succeed
because a company can't patent an idea, only an application of that idea.
"If the stuff they were talking about -- bookmarks, the 'save as' function -- was patented (by Wang), (the patent) is going to get
blown away," said David B. Himelstein.
"Take bookmarks, for example. We have seen them before we got into the computer age, and the idea of calling something a
bookmark because it's on a computer -- it's hard to see that as rights to an invention," Himelstein said.
"I don't know what Wang is trying to do."
The patent in question, according to Netscape, is US Patent number 4,751,669, called videotext frame processing, from Wang
Laboratories. A patent database shows that it was filed in 1985 and issued in 1988. |
