Enough is enough. I had to take the unusual (for me) step and sign a petition. I also handed in my resignation from the company's intellectual property task force and pledge to donate the 10.000 yen bonus I got for my work in that team so far to open-source projects.

In August, Microsoft lost a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Eolas Technologies. The jury in the case decided that Microsoft's support for ActiveX controls, plug-ins and Java applets in its Internet Explorer browser infringes on United States Patent 5,838,906, owned by the University of California and licensed to Eolas in 1994. Microsoft was ordered to pay $521 million to Eolas and the University and also change the way Internet Explorer works. They have now announced changes it will make to stop Internet Explorer from infringing on the patent. Unmodified pages will very likely prompt the user every time when some Flash or Shockwave or Java applet or Quicktime movie or ActiveX control is loaded, greatly disturbing the browsing experience. This prompt cannot be disabled by the user. According to Microsoft (and Apple and Macromedia and the Mozilla Organization), there will be new ways to embed the plugins that do not infringe and thus can be shown directly. Although this will hopefully restore the status quo, it does incur a lot of otherwise unneccesary web page rewriting.

Another annoying fact is that Microsoft are the good guys this time.