[Alpine]

THE US PATENT office said that a patent that Microsoft was held to have infringed does indeed belong to Eolas.



The patent office vetted the web browsing intellectual property application twice.

Eolas Technology is a spun off unit of the University of California and two years back Microsoft was stung for half a billion for infringing its patent.

But earlier this year, an appea;s court partly overruled that decision.

Florian Muller, who campaigned successfully against software patent directives in Europe, told the INQ: "Pro-patent politicians told us that broad and trivial patents can be invalidated. If even Microsoft with all of its resources doesn't always succeed in that, what can smaller companies do?" Muller claimed Microsoft supported practically every lobbying organisation supporting the software patents directive in Europe, including ACT, CompTIA, the "Campaign for Creativity", EICTA and the Business Software Alliance.

The INQuirer