More news about the Eolas’ patent case regarding the use of plugins in hypertext documents: a federal judge rejected Microsoft’s first post-trial claim, in which the company alleged that Eolas had misrepresented the facts in the case. The company is already planning an appeal.

That is a very bad news since it implies that Microsoft may soon be forced to change IE to comply with the judicial decision, removing the support to embedded plugins in the browser. If that happens, it means applications that rely on such technology will have to be converted. Also, it means that companies like Macromedia, which has a whole business around the technology, may suffer severe economic drawbacks. Finally, it means that other companies and organizations that develop browsers will be forced to change their products as well. Needless to say, all those actions will cost an enormous amount of money.

On the other hand, the patent is very specific, and, as the article shows, solutions can and are being devised to work around those specificities. Obviously, there will be problems and costs with any chosen approach, but they are better than simply dropping all support to the technology. Some of the suggestions suggested by the members of the W3C, which congregates most of the companies affected by the decision, are: the use of dialog boxes prior the execution of a plugin, as it works around the patent requirement of an automated launching of the plugin; and the embedding of the plugin data in the page itself, as it works around the parent requirement of a connection to an external source. Each solution has its drawbacks, which will have to be addressed if they are really implemented.

In my opinion, however, the case may end up resulting in some benefits to the industry. Many things that required plugins today could be replaced by DHTML solutions if its support were to be improved in browsers. Many of the things only possible today using either Flash or ActiveX would be doable in DHTML with a more powerful implementation of both the DOM and scripting technologies.

The case raises some questions about how the W3C and the companies creating Web technologies must react to patents. Ironically, the W3C published its own patent policy not long ago, although, of course, it only applies to its members. The case also brings to the table once again the subject of improper patents conceded without regards to prior art.

Anyway, there’s still a long way to go in this case, and some waiting will be necessary before anything is really decided. But one thing is sure: the Internet has a long history of routing around damage, and I don’t think the history will be different this time.