Appeal No. 2005-1431
Application 09/442,070
collectively "Eolas") against Microsoft Corporation: Eolas Technologies, Inc. v. Microsoft
Corp., No. 99 C 0626 (N.D. Ill.). Specifically, Eolas asserted infringement of the Doyle patent
claims by Microsoft's Internet Explorer program.
The district court, pursuant to Markman v. Westview Instruments, 517 U.S. 370,
34 USPQ2d 1321 (1996), entered a memorandum opinion and order construing the following
phrase from Doyle patent claims 1 and 6: "wherein said object has type information associated
with it utilized by said browser to identify and locate an executable application." Eolas
Technologies, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., No. 99 C 0626, 2000 WL 1898853 (N.D. Ill. Dec. 29,
2000), at *4 (not reported in F.Supp.2d). The court's construction of these terms was based in
part on arguments made during the prosecution history of the Doyle patent to distinguish the
claims from appellants' U.S. Patent 5,581,686, referred to by the court as "the Koppolu patent,"
which has the same disclosure as the '701 patent.7 Id. at *11-13, 16. The court construed
"executable application" to mean "any computer program code, that is not the operating system
or a utility, that is launched to enable an end-user to directly interact with data.” Id. at *14.
Regarding the phrase "utilized by said browser to identify and locate," the court held that “the
functions of utilizing the type information to identify and locate the executable application must
be performed by the browser, not the operating system as in Koppolu's OLE [Object Linking and
Embedding]." Id. at *18.
7 Appellants' '686 patent, like their '701 patent, purports to be a continuation of
Application 08/229,264, filed April 15, 1994.
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