The U.S. Patent Office dissolved a patent obtained by a Utah inventor who demanded royalties from Novell Inc., claiming the software company took his idea for client-server network computing.
Provo-based Novell argued Roger E. Billings never should have gotten the 1987 patent because it described technology already in use.
A Patent Office appeals board agreed with Novell and rejected all of Billings' patent claims in a decision dated June 2. The office plans to issue a certificate disowning his patent.
"I'm not down-and-out. I feel the opposite," Billings, 55, now of Independence, Mo., said Thursday. He was glad the Patent Office finally acted, letting him file a federal court appeal asserting Novell owes him hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.
Novell argued that Xerox Corp. and Datapoint Corp., among other companies, already were using the technology Billings described in his patent.
"If the patent had stood, it could have affected the computer networking community generally," Novell attorney Gary Hecker of Los Angeles said Thursday. He said the decision affirms that patents that never should have been issued "can be eviscerated."
Hecker said Billings has "zero" chance trying to reverse the decision at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. Billings said that court is friendly to inventors and "I think our case is looking pretty good."
Billings is president of WideBand Corp., which makes high-speed network products, and his efforts to perfect hydrogen energy technology received coverage in the July 21 issue of Time magazine.
As a teenager in Provo, Billings won an international science fair by converting his father's Model A pickup to run on hydrogen. The prize was a scholarship to Brigham Young University.
In 1973 he founded Billings Energy Corp. in Utah but had trouble exploiting hydrogen's commercial potential and sold off the company in 1984.
Billings also was making computers in the 1970s when he stumbled across an idea for a computer networking system that came to be known as client-server computing. It replaced huge mainframe computers that made up office systems, instead linking desktop computers by servers and letting people share data and computer equipment.
Billings said he showed off the system at a trade show in 1982, and Novell introduced its NetWare server technology in 1983. Billings got a patent and in 1991 sued Novell, at first seeking tripled royalties of $672 million. The continued sale of Novell products has for Billings fattened the potential jackpot.
Novell asked the Patent Office to re-examine Billing's patent claims, finally winning last month.
Billings is bitter about the fight. He said Novell obtained and leaked to the press an unpublished paper he wrote in 1985 defending polygamy and other early Mormon beliefs of church founder Joseph Smith and his successor Brigham Young.
Billings said polygamy was prominently mentioned in widespread media coverage of his patent fight. Excommunicated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — which officially renounced polygamy more than a century ago — Billings said he asked the church first to be removed from its membership rolls.
He still believes in Smith's original teachings but says he never practiced polygamy.
Billings also helped found the International Academy of Science of Independence, Mo., an unaccredited, alternative school for entrepreneurs built partly underground in a limestone mine.
"Novell said I lived in a cave," he said.