Eolas

This article is about the US corporation. For other uses of Eolas, see Eolas (disambiguation).
Eolas
Company typeCorporation
Founded1994
FounderDr. Michael Doyle
Headquarters
Tyler, Texas
,
United States

Eolas (Irish pronunciation: [ˈoːl̪ˠəsˠ], meaning "Knowledge"; bacronym: "Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems") is a United States technology firm formed as a spin-off from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in order to commercialize UCSF's patents for work done there by Eolas' co-founders, as part of the Visible Embryo Project. The company was founded in 1994 by Dr. Michael Doyle, Rachelle Tunik, David Martin, and Cheong Ang from the UCSF Center for Knowledge Management (CKM).[1] The company was created at the request of UCSF, and was founded by the inventors of the university's patents.[2]

In addition to the work done while at UCSF, Dr. Doyle has led work at Eolas to create new technologies ranging from Spatial Genomics/Spatial transcriptomics,[3] Code signing, transient-key cryptography, and blockchain[4] to mobile AI assistants[5] and automated audio conversation annotation.[6]

The University of California, San Francisco CKM team created an advanced early web browser that supported plugins, streaming media, and cloud computing, which could provide seamless access to potentially-unlimited remote high-performance computational capabilities. They demonstrated it at Xerox PARC, in November 1993, at the second Bay Area SIGWEB meeting. The claim that the plug-in/applet functionality was an innovation, advanced to justify their patent application, has been contested by Pei-Yuan Wei,[7] who developed the earlier Viola browser, which added scripted-app capabilities in 1992,[8] a claim supported by inventor of the WWW Sir Tim Berners-Lee[9] and other Web pioneers.[10] Given only a short time to prepare, Wei was only able to demonstrate Viola's equivalent capabilities for local rather than remote files at the 2003 Eolas v. Microsoft trial, and thus fell short of proving prior art to the trial court's satisfaction.[11] The case with Microsoft over patent 5,838,906 was settled in 2007 for a confidential amount of money after an initial $565 million judgment was stayed on appeal, but the University of California disclosed its piece of the final settlement as $30.4 million. In 2009 Eolas sued numerous other companies over patent number 7,599,985 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.[12] As of June 2011, a number of these companies, including Texas Instruments, Oracle and JPMorgan Chase, had signed licensing deals with Eolas, while the company continued to seek licenses from others.[13]

In February 2012, an eight-person jury in the Eastern District of Texas invalidated some of the claims in the ’906 and ’985 patents, and in July 2012, Judge Leonard Davis ruled against Eolas.[14] One year later, moreover, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sustained that ruling.

However, after a new patent covering cloud computing on the Web was granted to Eolas in November 2015,[15] Eolas filed a new lawsuit against Google, Amazon and Walmart, which is currently[when?] underway in the Northern District of California.[16]

  1. ^ Paul Festa (2003-08-14). "Will browser verdict snare others?". CNET News.
  2. ^ [1], RealClear Politics: Revisiting Big Tech's Patent Troll Boogeyman, retrieved 2020-10-13
  3. ^ US 7613571, Doyle, Michael D.; Pescitelli, Jr., Maurice J. & Williams, Betsey S. et al., "Method and system for the multidimensional morphological reconstruction of genome expression activity", published 2009-11-03 
  4. ^ US 6381696, Doyle, Michael D., "Method and system for transient key digital time stamps", published 2002-04-30, assigned to Proofspace Inc. 
  5. ^ US 10015318, Landers, Steven Carl & Doyle, Michael D., "Automated communications response system", published 2018-07-03, assigned to Eolas Technologies Inc. 
  6. ^ US 10582350, Martin, David C. & Doyle, Michael D., "Method and apparatus for automatically identifying and annotating auditory signals from one or more parties", published 2020-03-03, assigned to Eolas Technologies Inc. 
  7. ^ "Re: EOLAS ACQUIRES MILESTONE INTERNET SOFTWARE PATENT from Pei Wei on 1995-08-21 ([email protected] from July to August 1995)". Lists.w3.org. Retrieved February 11, 2012.
  8. ^ Paul Festa (2003-10-08), "Eolas files motion to enjoin IE", CNET News
  9. ^ Steve Malone (3 March 2005). "Microsoft wins latest round in Eolas patent battle". PC Pro.
  10. ^ Paul Festa (31 October 2003). "Web patent critics spotlight old technology". CNET News.
  11. ^ "Eolas Technologies Inc. v. Microsoft Corp" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-11-29. Retrieved 2014-11-21. {}
  12. ^ Eaton, Nick (October 6, 2009). "After beating Microsoft, Eolas sues everyone else". Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Retrieved February 11, 2012.
  13. ^ Nancy Gohring (June 17, 2011) TI Signs License Deal After Eolas Patent Lawsuit[permanent dead link], IDG News
  14. ^ "MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER" (PDF). UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF TEXAS, TYLER DIVISION. July 19, 2012. Retrieved July 1, 2013.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference patent3 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ "District-Court-Eolas-Technologies-v.-Amazon.com-02-24-16.pdf" (PDF). ipwatchdog.com. IPWatchdog. Retrieved 13 October 2020.