Thursday, July 11, 2002

Appeals Court Rules Against Researcher Who Claimed Patents on Online-Database Use By VINCENT KIERNAN A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled against a researcher employed by the University of California who maintains that, a decade ago, he invented and patented a key aspect of Web surfing: using a database from a distance. The researcher, Allan M. Konrad, is a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif., which the University of California operates for the U.S. Energy Department. In 1990, Mr. Konrad developed a staff-directory database, located on a mainframe computer on the Berkeley campus, that users of individual workstations could consult online. Based on that work, he received three patents for systems for using a database on a remote computer. Two years ago, Mr. Konrad sued 39 companies that used software made by the Netscape Communications Corporation, including Boeing, General Motors, Hilton Hotels, and United Air Lines, claiming that they had violated his patents. (Last year, a federal judge in Texas ruled against Mr. Konrad in that suit.) In response to his suit, Netscape joined with Microsoft and America Online in their own suit against Mr. Konrad, which asked that his patents be overturned. Tuesday's ruling, by a panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, was in the case brought by Netscape, Microsoft, and America Online. The ruling did not deal with whether Mr. Konrad's patents cover all Web-based uses of databases but focused on the question of whether Mr. Konrad had inadvertently invalidated his own patents. For example, one of the issues in the case was whether Mr. Konrad's patents are valid given that he had adapted his directory system to store abstracts and papers in high-energy physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center before he filed the first of his patent applications, in 1993. An invention cannot be patented more than a year after it has come into public use or has been offered for sale, and the appeals court agreed with a decision by a lower-court judge that the physics database was such a "public use" of Mr. Konrad's technique. Mr. Konrad also ran into trouble because he had offered to create the physics database for the University Research Association-Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory in September 1991 in return for four months of employment at the laboratory. That amounted to offering the technology for sale, the appeals court decided. Mr. Konrad declined to comment. One of his lawyers, Kenneth C. Hill, said that there had been no decision about whether to appeal. Another ruling by the same three-judge panel, reviewing the Texas decision in Mr. Konrad's suit against the Netscape customers, is expected shortly and could influence the possibility of an appeal, Mr. Hill said. "We're pleased the appellate court has affirmed the district court's ruling," said Marty Gordon, a Netscape spokesman. The text of the appeals-court decision is available online, in Microsoft Word format. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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