This excellent article on Wikipedia,Eolas – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, explains the patent, the litigation, the browser changes and provides links to Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, SWFObject, and ActiveX scripts and workarounds to try to deal with the issue.
Eolas is something completely new to me. Do your readers understand it? Perhaps an article needs to be written, from your unique perspective?
I’ve posted about it before, particularly regarding the changes in Active X objects in the upcoming IE7 release. The Wikipedia article I pointed to is really an excellent summary of the whole issue and probably a more complete description of it that I would give here in any one post.
If you are a Dreamweaver 8 user, be sure to download and install the new updater (8.0.2). The updater adds the necessary IE/Win Active X workarounds to the page automatically when you add a Flash, Quicktime or other media object to your HTML.