Microsoft Loses the Lawsuit with Eolas, for Now

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has confirmed that the patent 5,838,906 belongs to Eolas Technologies.

The patent in question describes the way in which one can insert multimedia content within Internet sites, a technology similar to the one used by ActiveX.

If the patent is granted to Eolas, programs like Macromedia Flash, QuickTime, RealOne Player, Acrobat Reader, Sun Java Virtual Machine and Windows Media Player will also be affected.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Micro...Now-9650.shtml

As I understood, MS has proof that they worked on this before Eolas patent. OK, if so why did they not patent their work? Anyway it seems that MS is not the only one who has problems with this.