Netscape is crying out for a little geek love.
Mozilla.org became the company's pipeline for soliciting a little technical assistance today. Netscape hopes that the developers who normally use Mozilla.org to contribute free source code will provide help as it tries to fend off a patent lawsuit filed against the company last October.
According to Netscape, Wang has charged the browser company with violating a 1985 Wang patent by incorporating certain features in its browser, a patent which Netscape maintains is "noninfringed, unenforceable, and invalid."
Netscape posted an announcement of the suit on the front page of Mozilla.org, reasoning that developers have as much to lose as the company from a successful suit. A Wang victory puts the source code at risk, so Netscape is asking for help to gather technical evidence proving that Wang's patent has no validity.
According to Netscape officials, the suit charges the company with infringing on a patent that Wang holds for a videotext system in the Netscape browser. The functions affected include those that save Web pages from a server, bookmarks, and decoding documents based on the use of file extensions.
Netscape cites several patented technologies that predate the Wang patent and therefore invalidate it. Such patents are known as "prior art," meaning they are similar enough to the new patent to invalidate claims by the inventor of uniqueness or originality.
Netscape's list of prior art relevant to the case includes the Alto and Star computers from Xerox Parc, terminal emulators, and Telidon, Prestel, and Mupid, video-text systems used in the late '70s and early '80s.
One San Diego attorney specializing in Internet software patent protection said that Wang's suit was unlikely to succeed because a company can't patent an idea, only an application of that idea.
"If the stuff they were talking about -- bookmarks, the 'save as' function -- was patented [by Wang], it is going to get blown away," said David B. Himelstein.
"Take bookmarks, for example. We have seen them before we got into the computer age, and the idea of calling something a bookmark because it's on a computer -- it's hard to see that as rights to an invention," Himelstein said.
"I don't know what Wang is trying to do."
The patent in question, according to Netscape, is US Patent number 4,751,669, called videotext frame processing, from Wang Laboratories. A patent database shows that it was filed in 1985 and issued in 1988.
"We believe the patent is noninfringed, unenforceable, and invalid," Netscape says in its plea to developers. "If you know of additional prior art publications, software programs, books, or systems in existence -- prior to March 30, 1983 -- which disclose and/or describe the claimed elements, send us a message."
As has been the case in other patent infringement lawsuits, the defendant eagerly publicizes the suit and why it feels it is unfair, while the prosecution remains silent. A Wang official said the company has a strict policy of not discussing litigation.
Wang has a relationship with Netscape's browser competitor, Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer product would presumably also be in violation of any valid patent. Microsoft had no comment.
