Flash movies play because of a plugin in the browser. This plugin automatigically start up the program/player that is needed to see the content. There are different plugins for quicktime, applets, flash and others. A really nifty invention one might think.

The question is however, whose invention was it? In ninties of the last century a group of smart people from the university of California had a smart idea. So smart, they thought, that actually got a patent on the idea of: ” Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document “. Which is basically a plugin. Do keep in mind however that plugins weren’t known yet then.

Or were they? The company Eolas has a licence to use this patent and has sued Microsoft for using that idea without paying for it. A judge actually says Eolas is right and Microsoft has to pay the astronomical amount of $521 million for patent infringement. Well, of course Microsoft went into appeal, but to prevent the cost coming out higher if they should loose they’ve made the decision to give out a patch for IE in which the Eolas patent is recognised.

That means, that no flash movie, applet or anything in the <applet> <object> or <embed> tags will work. Of course embed wasn’t a valid tag to start with, so this patch migth well be the way to get it off the Internet. But, there’s still the problem of your content not starting immediately. When you mouse over the flash movie (or other object) you’ll get a message ‘click to active and use this control’. Well, that’s definately not user friendly.

The solution

Luckily there is a way around it, unfortunately it uses javascript. That means that people without javascript still don’t get a working object automatically. The solution is to make the flashmovie start with javascript, and this works around the patent because the patent is on starting external players AUTOMATICALLY when the browsers finds uses for it. In this case, it’s not started automatically, but with javascript, so there’s specific code to make it work.

Adobe (fomerly known as Macromedia) has a page just for this issue, with code examples and explanation why and how this has happened. As they’re bound to update this page when problems with the code appear I’ll only give the link instead of the code itself.

Code example

So for all developers that use flash, make sure you have content fixed, and your users will still get a seamless experience.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 6:43 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Webdevelopment, Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.