According to Reuters, the suit filed by Leon Stambler in February 2001 went to trial this week, with the plaintiff claiming in his opening statement that previous defendants Certicom and Openwave each paid $400,000 plus royalties to license the patents. First Data, he said, paid $4m to settle.
Stambler is suing based on seven of his eight US patents, three entitled Method for securing information relevant to a transaction and four entitled Secure transaction system and method utilized therein.
RSA and VeriSign deny infringement. SSL was invented by Netscape Communications in 1994 and is now the de facto standard way to encrypt web traffic. Stambler started filing his patents applications in 1992, and was granted the patents in 1998 and 1999. He started seeking royalties that year, and sued two years later.
Stambler is no stranger to this type of litigation. In 1988, he sued Diebold Inc over a patent on the use of PINs in ATMs, having already licensed the patents to other companies. Stambler lost when it emerged he had worked on a committee that was working on standards in that area ten years earlier, without disclosing his patent interests.
According to online legal resources, the judge in the Diebold case said Stambler could not remain silent while an entire industry implemented the proposed standard and then, when the standards were adopted, assert that his patent covered what manufacturers believed to be an open and available standard.
Source: Computerwire
