Software patents and knock-on effects

Just spent a bit of time trying to fix some issues that have just started appearing with some of our sites that use the Dynamic HTML Edit control from Microsoft. It's a great control, and allows non-techys to enter styled content into an admin page without learning HTML.

But recently, things changed. First of all, the control had a little yellow message when it appeared on screen: press spacebar or enter to activate and use this control, but when you did this, it still refused to accept any keyboard input. Not good.

Thankfully Microsoft have a page of possible fixes, and we believe that it's now working (tested on IE6 that had that patch that causes this, and IE7 beta2 which apparently does this by default), just awaiting user-feedback.

But it seems that many smaller dev companies are going to be pushed into situations like this more and more. The reason? Software patents.

The whole reason that this issue has occurred, and caused untold hours of work fixing it around the world is because a company called EOLAS have a patent on web pages that have plug-ins. In these days of multimedia content, many sites have embedded video, flash and other controls - like the edit control we use. Microsoft's update means that any site using these methods will be effected, and will need to apply one of the different fixes to remedy their site. But it keeps them out of the patent arguments.

Of course, this is just IE for now, but expect FireFox and Safari to be targeted next...