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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."
It's come to this now? How bad does it have to get before the entire system is scrapped?
Many of the companies named has defendants have used patent laws to their advantage. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out, especially since Tim Berners-Lee, who is completely against software patents, is set to testify.
We don't live in Shouldland.
This guy claims he "allowed users to interact with images inside of a web browser window" ?? So a web browser was invented before the web itself? Can we ask him if the chicken or egg came first?
So you not only sued Microsoft, you actually won 500 million. Regardless of whether this was a dick move on your part or not, good for you, you are now set for life (or 3).
Now why on Earth would you risk it all by going into litigation again?
On a practical note, since this was an 'invention' in 1993, wouldn't the patent expire next year anyway (20 year patent life?) In that case, won't somebody like IBM just tie this up in the courts and give the lawyers something to chew on until it runs out anyway?
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Add to that what image file format did he use.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
So, it seems there's a chance that waiting too long can invalidate your claims.
Compare with trademark law where you have to defend it whenever it may be seen to be infringed (see the case where Hoover corp lost the right to have the exclusive rights to the term "hoover"); the same doctrine should apply for patents. Of course, the whole patent system is a mess these days as it was designed in a different age with different industries. Scrapping patents isn't the solution as they provide valuable protection to inventors who put effort into designing something, but they're horribly abused by various parties.
Even if combining file transfer [ftp] and image scrolling is patent-legally considered "novel", there is the question of damages. 1993 patents ran out (in the US) in 2010, so he cannot get any ongoing damages.
Optaining "back-damages" would be highly dependant on legal procedure, but I doubt he would be entitled to [m]any if he did not inform the alleged infringers during the period of their alleged infringement. It's not like browser coders were hard to see, find or email. Just another troll.
If you'd read the article, you'd see that there has been some back-and-forth with the patent office. Most of his claims were invalidated and some were then later reinstated. He had semi-successfully sued Microsoft, had the judgement overturned, and then later reached a settlement (undisclosed, but estimated to be in the realm of $100 million). Worth noting is that Microsoft was not allowed to present evidence of prior art at trial. Why that would be, I have no idea - I'm not a patent lawyer. In any event, in terms of this guy not acting on his claims, that's just an indictment of how slow the legal and patent processes move.
Certainly, there's no question that by the time his patent application was publicly published, much less granted, everything in there was in common use. Frankly, if you strip out all of the buzzwords like hypermedia, it boils down to something as simple as downloading and running a script. That's it. And there's plenty of prior art that existed in 1994 for all of the claims listed in the application.
He should win. Then finally it will become blatantly obvious that copyrights and patents must be abolished.
You can't handle the truth.
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot cam predates this by two years, though that was on a local network and didn't use a web browser. It didn't appear on the Internet until November, 1993.
The Netscape Fishcam shortly followed. I believe the first outdoor cam was at an antartic research station shortly after that.
Moving images were enabled by the "server-push" feature in Netscape's server and client. I'm assuming this used that technology, which of necessity would have pre-dated this claim. I would think the use case would be obvious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
The "patent" fig 9 discusses how to get the NCSA Mosaic 2.4 browser to display his object. He did NOT invent the Internet. He did NOT even invent NCSA Mosaic. He claims to have invented a way to view *his* 3D imaging object within a standard (at the time) browser. While there are some applicatons for viewing 3D within a browser, but I don't think they all need X-Windows protocols and the specific framework laid out in this patent to work within that particular viewing paradigm. Lets not panic just yet.
Oh no, he won't sue the entire planet. You see, most reasonable countries, like Europe, don't have software patents.