Click To Activate & Use This Control
Recently people have started noticing something odd. They have to click on a flash file, java applet, or any other interactive component before using it. What causes this? Thanks to a patent troll by Eolas Technologies, Microsoft has chosen to make a change to their Internet Exporer interface for all content that requires an applet, object, or embed tag.
A Ridiculous Patent
I’m not going to go into the specifics, but Eolas filed the patent in 1998 and basically claims to have invented the process of using interactive content on the internet. The W3C has even gotten involved, claiming that documents published over a decade ago qualify as prior art against this ridiculous patent.
Eolas wants 521 million dollars from Microsoft to license the priviledge of allowing IE 6 to work the way it has worked since 2001. Oh, and they don’t care about licensing to the browsers with smaller market share (Mozilla, Opera, et al).