Are you willing to pay Opera’s lawyer bills, then?

Or do you think that Opera can just ignore lawsuits and hope that they go away without having to protect the company from those lawsuits?

The Eolas patent dates back from 1998. Opera may very well be liable for PAST infringement even if changes are made from this point one. Microsoft is still under the Eolas lawsuit even though they made changes.

2. Regarding the oslo1 comment in regards to the 7,016,084 patent:

The Tsai patent postdates the Eolas patent by at least 8 years. If anything, the Eolas patent will override the Tsai patent.

Additionally, the Tsai patent claims section has no relevance to the Eolas patent. It deals with voice and fax processing of web pages.

Additionally, the Eolas patent is currently active as reported by the USPTO. Unless you have some other credible source to the contrary, I am inclined to believe the US Government over some anonymous comment on another website.

The Eolas ‘906 patent is invalid, despite appearances to the naïve public to the contrary. The “controlling patent” is US No. 7,016,084 by a guy named Irving Tsai from MIT who is rumoured to be a friend of Jon Von Tetzchner’s (no less!).
Check out the claims section of that patent.

The reason no one is talking about this to the public is because Bill Gates allegedly was stealing from the inventor, with the help of the inventor’s lawyers, whom he bribed. The inventor went to Steve Jobs “for help” only to have Jobs rob him also. Someone blogged about this last year in a blog commentary which has become eerily prescient as of last week.

See:

http://p2pnet.net/index.php?page=comment&story=5185&comment=15123

then compare the allegations from the above to Bill Gates’ “surprise announcement” last week regarding a Microsoft and a “Universal Communications Platform” :

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2006/06-26unifiedcomm.asp

Further, within just the past 24 hours there have been reports that Microsoft plans to declare war on Apple’s iPod this Christmas. See these next two links:

http://www.playfuls.com/news_03341_Microsoft_plans_to_kill_iPod_for_Christmas.html

http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/07/microsoft-apple-ipod-cx_po_0707autofacescan03.html

and again with respect to “prescience” note how that June 2005 blog says and I quote:

“We saw something else that might concern you Mr. Jobs: we saw inventions specifically crafted for attacking Apple’s market grip on the iPod.”

Taken together the commentary appears rather credible if you ask me.

Supposedly Windows Vista was delayed to cut out portions of code that infringe on the 7,016,084 patent, and not because of security reasons, which were just a front for the public.

See this story about the “In a hastily scheduled conference call Tuesday” to announce the delay of Windows Vista on March 21, 2006.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125213,00.asp

Jim Alchin made the announcement the afternoon of the same Tuesday that the 7,016,084 patent was published.
Microsoft was supposedly watching out for it and expected it to come, but was holding back on making its move until the patent formally published, as it surely did that Tuesday morning, of the day Allchin was ordered to reveal to the public the delay of Vista.

And 24 hours after that, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be separated from the OS!

See the Slashdot.org report on this:

http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/22/1817258.shtml

It was precisely the integration of browser-to-OS that triggered the DOJ antitrust suit, was it not? And Bill Gates testified under oath that the two could not be separated without destroying Windows.
Now the two are being cleaved apart – without fanfare and seemingly in the hope that the public will not even notice what happened. Why? What’s going on here?

As PBS tech historian “Robert X. Cringely” calls it, this whole “mess” Microsoft is secretly in, and the Watergate-like cover-up and bribery and conspiracy was what necessitated Gates’ departure to become a full-time philanthropist – and not some sudden found love of humanitarian issues. The question is, if a scandal suddenly explodes into the news and dirty deeds become revealed, how will Warren Buffet react to his having been duped by “his trusted buddy Bill Gates”, who has apparently played Warren as a PR prop, just as he has played evrybody else?

Tim Berners Lee is not innocent either, but let’s leave him out. Although one should know that TimBL sits in an office in the “Stata Center” built with money Bill Gates gave MIT, in 1998-1999, when this scandal was just beginning. Price of complicity. Silly little office.

The bottom line however is that it is unlikely Opera need ever worry about Eolas. On the contrary, it is Eolas that needs to worry whether they will face criminal prosecution for perpetrating a fraud against the entire Internet community, using a patent they know to be invalid, and technology that may have been stolen.

This doesn’t mean it is going to be sued as the post title suggests…