The company relocated to East Texas before filing suit against 20 big companies, including Apple, Perot Systems, Blockbuster, eBay, Adobe, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. By then, the business of 'patent trolling' had matured and become fantastically lucrative. That resulted in an unusual director-ordered reexamination at the US Patent Office, but Eolas somehow emerged unscathed.Įolas got a second patent similar to its first in 2009. It was actually denounced by the web's global standard-setting body in 2003. Meanwhile, Eolas' original patent was getting serious attention. Appeals ensued but were inconclusive the case ultimately settled out for more than $100 million, with just over $30 million going to Eolas' co-plaintiff, the University of California. In 1999, he filed a lawsuit saying that Microsoft's Internet Explorer violated his patent on 'interactive' features on the web the suit resulted in a $540 million jury verdict.

Eolas never made a marketable product, but it ultimately launched a patent war that made Doyle a rich man. University lawyers helped Doyle patent the creation in 1994.ĭoyle took the patent and created a company he called 'Eolas,' the Irish word for knowledge. He oversaw the creation of a program that allowed doctors to view embryos online, and later claimed it was the first 'interactive' use of the World Wide Web. In 1993, Doyle was the director of a computer lab at the University of California-San Francisco. The company mounted a lengthy appeal, but it was all for naught this morning, a three-judge appeals panel affirmed the jury's verdict without comment. It was the culmination of a bold campaign by a man named Michael Doyle to levy a vast patent tax on the modern web.īerners-Lee was one of several web pioneers who came through the court during the course of a four-day trial, which ultimately convinced a jury to invalidate two patents owned by Eolas, the tiny patent-holding company that Doyle and his lawyers transformed into one of the most fearsome 'patent trolls' of all time. In February 2012, he left Cambridge to fly down to Tyler, an East Texas city of about 100,000, to testify at a patent trial. The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, had never testified in court before last year.

A personal nightmare dos