Man Claiming He Invented the Internet Sues

wiedzmin writes "A low-profile Chicago biologist, Michael Doyle, and his company Eola Technologies, who has once won a $521m patent lawsuit against Microsoft, claim that it was actually he and two co-inventors who invented, and patented, the "interactive web" before anyone else, back in 1993. Doyle argues that a program he created to allow doctors to view embryos over the early Internet, was the first program that allowed users to interact with images inside of a web browser window. He is therefore seeking royalties for the use of just about every modern interactive Internet technology, like watching videos or suggesting instant search results. Dozens of lawyers, representing the world's biggest internet companies, including Yahoo, Amazon, Google and YouTube are acting as defendants in the case, which has even seen Tim Berners-Lee testify on Tuesday."

Comments

there has to be some statute of limitations...

[Karmashock]

I mean... if you file your claim decades after everyone was violating your patient isn't that your fault at a certain point?

I know big companies are basically forced to defend their trademark and copyrights or else risk that other people can do it with impunity. There's some requirement that you protest when this sort of thing happens.

So... shouldn't he have protested like... forever ago?

For the sake of argument, if his claims are all valid, they should be void now because he didn't act on them until now.

Re:there has to be some statute of limitations...

[stating_the_obvious]

RT(F)A -- Suit originally filed in 1999. Since the claim is specifically against image interaction, rather than simply hyperlinks, the timing is just about right.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Patent Lifespan?

[Surt]

It doesn't matter to the courts if the patent expires during the course of the case. The damages, if legitimate, were done during the period the patent was active. He just won't accrue any additional damage once the patent expires.

Prior Usage.

[jellomizer]

Back in them Old BBS days we Had RIPScript and RIPScript 2
There was also a Graphical BBS Engine called Roboboard and its upgrade Roboboard/FX
There were systems like Prodigy, and AOL which had images...

Re:LIAR

[Samantha Wright]

What I want to know is: "How did 'inventing a web browser plugin' get turned into 'invented a network that has been in place since 1969'?" Seriously, I want to stab samzenpus in the face for letting this through. What's next? Will Bill Gates be said to have invented the microchip?

Re:LIAR

[wjousts]

That is a direct quote from Al Gore

Taken out-of-context and by your own admission, not what he meant to say. That's why it tiring and not funny any more.

Re:Really?

[hey!]

Well, looking at his patent claims, it's a lot more like he's patented the use of something like Applescript to let a browser control an external application. In fact in 1994 this was quite common in the Apple world, Applescript being introduced in 1991. In fact I think quite a few people were viewing medical imagery and multimedia (remember when that was a buzzword?) stored in "databases" like FileMaker and (ugh) 4th Dimension. It was commonplace stuff in the Apple environment while the Microsoft-centric world was still banging the Windows 3 rocks together (remember Windows for Workgroups?).

The web, however, was not commonplace in 1994, so he may well have been the first to file for the use of this technique with a browser. However the technique was so commonplace it would be hard to imagine that it was *original*, especially if he used a browser with the necessary IPC mechanisms built-in. Why else *would* they developers have made an Applescript-aware brower *but* to interact with other programs? If they wrote the browser themselves, then they might have a claim that an IPC-aware browser was a novel thing.

In any case, unless I'm mistaken the patent doesn't describe built-in multi-media capabilities, or multi-media capabilities through plug-ins. It covers controlling an external program with a browser.

I wish this guy success though. As you suggest, this will gore enough oxen that somebody with money will care that the system is broken.

Re:Really?

[hey!]

I lived through this. Apple got rejected from the enterprise market because (a) they had no interest in competing with cheap commodity hardware and (b) they acted as though they were doing their IT department advocates more than enough favors by letting them buy Apple stuff in the first place. They had an unnerving habit of pulling the rug out from under you too. God help you if you invested Apple's A/UX Unix (which was technically superb).

Apple's "corporate DNA" has always destined it for the consumer market.

As for their networking support, it was superb for the time. The only drawback was the implementation of LocalTalk over RS 422; it was a bus topology like thinnet but slower and without positive locking connectors. You can't compare Apple's built-in networking to Windows 3, because Windows 3 didn't have any. If you compare it to Novell, Novell had better file serving, directory services and scalability. Apple had better practically everything else, including UI (of course), P2P and service discovery.

As for VB, it was a primitive era in 1994 when the patent was filed. VB 3, the first version with the Jet engine, had only come out the year before and VB code monkeys were excited about the datagrid control. In any case you have no idea what I'm talking about. Applescript is an object oriented inter-application communication system. It makes no sense to compare it to VB (you want to look at HyperCard for that); it makes more sense to compare it to something like CORBA or SOAP, only it provided a standard scripting language in addition to a networkable common object model (AppleEvents). On the whole it was very similar to Javascript and DOM, only able to control things other than web browsers.

Don't get me wrong. I'm *not* a fan of Apple the company. I swore I'd never develop for another Apple platform again (although iOS is tempting) because of Apple indifference to developers and enterprise managers. But Apple sure has made some products that were ahead of their time.