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US judge upholds $520 million verdict against Microsoft in patent infringement case 
Posted on Thursday, January 15, 2004 - 05:46 PM

US District Court Judge, James B. Zagel, on 14 January 2004 refused to overturn a $512 million verdict against Microsoft, ruling in favor of Eolas Technologies Inc. in their web patent infringment dispute.
The Eolas patent covers technology used to call up separate applications, such as a media player or document viewer, within a Web page. The patent at issue is titled "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document." The ruling could potentially affect other browser software as well.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced in November 2003 that it is reconsidering the patent. The decision followed warnings that any Microsoft redesign of its software would render many Web pages and products of independent software designers incompatible.

The software giant has 30 days to appeal the decision. An appeal would now go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, based in Washington, which has exclusive jurisdiction in patent cases.