Content area
Full Text
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...