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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?
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?
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.