The suit charges Microsoft with infringement of United States Patent 5,838,906 ('906) by Microsoft's various web-enabled operating system and application products, including Windows® 98, Windows 95 and Internet Explorer. Eolas holds worldwide exclusive commercial rights to the '906 patent. Eolas is represented in the suit by the law firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P.
The suit asks the court for both unspecified damages for the infringing activity and for an injunction to force Microsoft to cease all future manufacturing, use and sale of infringing products. The Eolas '906 patent was granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on November 17, 1998, for creation of the first browser system that, for example, allowed for the embedding of small interactive programs, such as "plug-ins," "applets," "scriptlets" or ActiveX® Controls, into World Wide Web documents.
The research team that built this system was led by Dr. Michael Doyle, Eolas' founder and CEO. The team developed the technology in the early 1990s while working on innovative software systems to provide medical students and practitioners with inexpensive and easy-to-use interactive access to high-resolution, 3-D, medical image data over the Internet.
Eolas Technologies Inc. (www.eolas.net) was founded in 1994 by Dr. Doyle and his team shortly after a U.S. patent application was submitted for their pioneering work. The company concentrates on the development of new technologies and the licensing of those technologies into various markets.
A subsidiary, Eolas Development Corporation (www.eolas.com), was recently spun out of Eolas Technologies to develop, market and sell software applications based upon Eolas-conceived technologies. Eolas Development Corp. focuses on tools and applications that help to make the Web a more interactive medium.
The company's zMap(TM) tools have reinvented the concept of the Web "imagemap" by allowing for animation. For example, the zMap CS package allows the creation and deployment of animated client-side "imagemaps" with moving irregular hotspots that follow objects in Web-based animations and video clips. These make more efficient use of the Web page and provide the user a more interactive Web experience than ever before. A typical implementation of zMap CS technology is a rotating image of a globe on which one can click on any country as the globe turns and be linked to information about that country.
Other zMap-based systems enable the creation of high-resolution and multidimensional "imagemaps," allowing the development of many kinds of previously impossible Web information systems for fields such as medical imaging, manufacturing, electronic commerce and online publishing. For example, a zMap-based system allows a user to rotate an image of a human body and click on body parts to go to information about them.
Eolas' new Spynergy® product line is advancing the state of the art for developers of embedded interactive content for Web pages. The Spynergy system allows for easy development of powerful embedded programs. The soon-to-be-released platform will set new industry-wide standards for Web-based client-side and client-server application development and deployment technologies for years to come.
Eolas and Spynergy are registered trademarks of Eolas Technologies Inc.
zMap is a trademark of Eolas Technologies Inc.
Windows and ActiveX are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.