The latest update from Microsoft isn’t as much for your protection as for Redmond’s. It changes ActiveX controls in an attempt to avoid continuing patent infringement.

Microsoft recently lost the court battle with Eolas Technologies over US Patent 5,838,906, Distributed Hypermedia Method For Automatically Invoking External Application Providing Interaction And Display Of Embedded Objects Within A Hypermedia, a.k.a. 906.

Before you start gloating over Yet Another Microsoft Stumble… You’d better read the patent abstract:

A system allowing a user of a web browser to access and execute an embedded program object. The program object is embedded into a hypermedia document much like data objects. Once selected, the program object executes on the user’s computer or may execute on a remote server or additional remote computers in a distributed processing arrangement. After launching the program object, the user can interact with the object as the invention provides for ongoing communication between the client and browser programs.

In other words, 906 technology lets you build interactive browser-embedded apps that are 100% operating system agnostic. The patent also covers most other interactive content, including ActiveX controls, Adobe Reader, Firefox plug-ins, Java applets, QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

As the University of California (UC) tells it, the inventors, Michael Doyle, David Martin and Cheong Ang, assigned the patent to UC in 1994. UC, in turn, offered 906 to Microsoft (and others), to no avail.

Amidst the thundering silence, UC licensed 906 to Doyle’s playpen, Eolas Technologies. Meanwhile, Microsoft embedded the unlicensed technology in Internet Explorer, which was then embedded in Windows.

The result put the hurt to Microsoft competitors, knocking Netscape for a loop, while providing zero patent income for Eolas.

The inventing team finally won some MS-respect when a federal jury awarded them US$520.6 million in 2003, which was followed by thumping reaffirmations of the patent’s standing by both the US Patent Office and the US Supreme Court.

Upshot? Microsoft is overhauling ActiveX. Come May Day, Redmond should have all versions of Windows de-Eolas’d… while continuing to claim this ain’t over till it’s over. Microsoft says that, from now on, ActiveX control activation will require that, “when a web page uses the APPLET, EMBED, or OBJECT elements to load an ActiveX control, the control’s user interface is blocked until the user activates it. If a page uses these elements to load multiple controls, each interactive control must be individually activated.”

By the time it’s all said-and-done, Microsoft will probably have spent around, oh, a zillion bucks for an innovation that might have cost little more than several dozen cappuccinos in 1993.

So how much should Firefox users care?

Eolas-Master Doyle told eWeek that open-sourcers are safe. It seems you have little to worry about… as long as you’re not an 800 pound gorilla in the northwest corner of the United States… Or at least, that’s the way we read it. (If he hadn’t had UC backing him up, Doyle would likely have been NetScaped.)

OK. Now you can gloat.

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