The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected an attempt to invalidate a far-reaching browser patent controlled by Eolas, despite fears that the patent and others like it could lead to Internet chaos.

The decision is a serious blow to Microsoft Corp.'s hopes of avoiding paying millions in damages to Eolas Technologies Inc. and being forced to redesign its flagship Web browser.

A system allowing a user of a browser program on a computer connected to an open distributed hypermedia system to access and execute an embedded program object. The program object is embedded into a hypermedia document much like data objects. The user may select the program object from the screen. Once selected the program object executes on the user's (client) computer or may execute on a remote server or additional remote computers in a distributed processing arrangement. After launching the program object, the user is able to interact with the object as the invention provides for ongoing interprocess communication between the application object (program) and the browser program. One application of the embedded program object allows a user to view large and complex multi-dimensional objects from within the browser's window. The user can manipulate a control panel to change the viewpoint used to view the image. The invention allows a program to execute on a remote server or other computers to calculate the viewing transformations and send frame data to the client computer thus providing the user of the client computer with interactive features and allowing the user to have access to greater computing power than may be available at the user's client computer.

I'm not going to do any doom-and-gloom speculation on what this victory means, especially when the infringement case is being appealed to the Supreme Court; I'll let you guys handle the speculation in the discussion thread. I'll just wrap up by noting that the '906 patent appears to be vague enough to cover almost any program that's embedded in a Web page and that talks bidirectionally with a server. That means not just Microsoft's ActiveX, the technology that originally brought on the round of Eolas vs. Microsoft infringement lawsuits, but Flash, Java, and most of the other stuff that makes the Web interesting to use. So there's no doubt that if the Eolas folks can take this fight all the way, they'll be very, very rich. It remains to be seen, however, just how much headache they'll cause for the rest of us as Microsoft and everyone else rushes to work around the patent.