If MS caves to this patent holder's victory in court last week, they are going to have to remove the offending code from IE which apparently means they will not be able to use plug-ins the way IE currently works.
"In the near term, Microsoft has indicated to the W3C that they will very soon be making changes to its Internet Explorer browser software in response to this ruling," Steven R. Bratt, chief operating officer of the W3C, said in a statement. "These changes may affect a large number of existing Web pages."
This week the standards body held an ad hoc meeting for its members, including Microsoft, during which people were asked to offer their opinions regarding any changes the software maker should make to IE. The objective of the meeting was to evaluate potential near-term changes that could be implemented in browsers, authoring tools and Web sites as a result of the court case. Roughly 50 individuals showed up at the meeting in San Francisco, with many others participating via a teleconference call, a W3C representative said.
[CNET News.com]
I guess Mozilla, Opera, and Safari will be next in line for lawsuits or licensing. I don't know enough about the technical details but, from what I've heard, the patent is vague enough to allow victories against any company that produces a browser that contains functionality that allows files of a certain type to be handled by specific external programs (applets, flash, embedded media players, etc) which is pretty much every brower, right?