Two interesting articles concerning patents from Lexis-Nexis. Link to second article.

Note: This Headline Is Patented

Not really -- but restroom instructions and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich were. The examples illustrate a bureaucracy in crisis.

David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer

Copyright 2003 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
February 7, 2003 Friday Home Edition

For decades, finicky children have been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crust removed. From a legal point of view, however, the lunchbox staple was invented on a patio in Fargo, N.D., in 1995.

David Geske, who ran a packaged ice business, was entertaining his friend Len Kretchman, a consultant. For lunch, their kids wanted peanut butter and jelly with the bread trimmed and folded over. As they were preparing the meal, Kristen Geske and Emily Kretchman told their husbands: "You guys should make a sandwich with no crust."

That offhand comment spawned Incredible Uncrustables, a sandwich the two entrepreneurs mass-produced for Midwestern schools. It also began a long-running dispute over whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office went too far when it gave Geske and Kretchman the first patent on a mundane household sandwich.

"This doesn't mean your grandmother can't make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," said Ann Harlan, a lawyer for J.M. Smucker Co., which now owns Geske and Kretchman's company.

But it does mean that Smucker will try to prevent other companies from making them. For more than two years, Smucker has been arguing in court and the patent office that a crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich made by Albie's Foods Inc. is violating its patent and must be taken off the market.

"They're misusing the patent system," said Albie's lawyer Kevin Heinl. "It's outrageous."

A generation ago, Smucker's sandwich, which looks like a flying saucer, and Albie's, which is a fat square, would have fought it out in the marketplace. The best sandwich would win.

Now the corporate urge is to get a patent to stifle competition. It's a process being helped along by the courts and Congress, which keep broadening the nature of what is patentable while limiting the patent office's ability to reject an application on the grounds of common sense.

Meanwhile, the system as a whole is breaking down. Patent applications are increasing in complexity and length, but the 3,500 examiners still are evaluated by how many they approve. The inevitable consequence, says one former examiner: "The path of least resistance is saying yes." Three-quarters of applications get approved.

Two former heads of the patent office have described the agency as sitting "on the edge of an abyss."

"Crisis is a strong word," the American Intellectual Property Law Assn. has noted in correspondence, "but we believe that it aptly describes the situation."

James E. Rogan, the former Republican congressman from Glendale who became director of the patent office in December 2001, agrees with all but the most strident critics.

"This is an agency in crisis, and it's going to get worse if we don't change our dynamic," Rogan said. "It doesn't do me any good to pretend there's not a problem when there is."

Beyond the plight of an antiquated government bureaucracy overseeing a field that is undergoing explosive growth, there are deeper questions about the fundamental role of patents.

They played a key role in the technology boom of the last 25 years. Companies licensed their innovations to others, who in turn used them as springboards for new inventions.

Yet there's a point where patents impede innovation. It can cost more to check whether a software program infringes on previously patented programs than it cost to write the program in the first place.

Since patents tend to be complex, infringement can be determined only by a professional. That's one reason the number of intellectual property lawyers has quadrupled since 1985. During the same time, the number of court cases involving intellectual property has doubled.

Technology companies, in particular, spend massive amounts of time and money either suing over patents or being sued. Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the popular BlackBerry hand-held e-mail device, sued competitors for alleged patent violations, gaining licensing fees. Then the company itself was sued for infringement. A private holding company called NTP Inc. said Research in Motion was violating its patents on wireless e-mail.

Research in Motion lost the case, recording a $32-million charge for litigation and related expenses. NTP is seeking an injunction to prevent the company from selling BlackBerrys. Meanwhile, the patent office is reviewing whether it should have granted the NTP patents in the first place.

"Developing software is like crossing a minefield: With each design decision, you might step on a patent that will blow up your project," said Richard Stallman, an advocate of free software. "A modern program combines hundreds of ideas, so be prepared for a long stroll among the mines."

The system was never supposed to be so combative. Patents, which last for 20 years, are enshrined in the Constitution as a means of promoting creativity and encouraging progress by rewarding inventors.

For a long time, the scope of patents was sharply limited and easily understood. Ideas and natural phenomena were not patentable. Machines and industrial processes were -- provided they were both new and useful.

In 1880, Supreme Court Justice Noah Swayne added a third requirement: A patentable invention, he wrote, should be inspired by "a flash of genius."

This put a high bar on patentability, and through the decades the courts raised it. In 1950, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, "The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. Patents serve a higher end -- the advancement of science."

Inventors and patent-seeking corporations didn't like that. Two years later, Congress removed the "flash of genius" standard and replaced it with a vaguer requirement of "non- obviousness."

That began to loosen the patent floodgates. In 1980, the Supreme Court said life, in the form of genetically engineered bacteria, was patentable. The decision gave birth to the modern biotech industry.

A Case for Licensing

Five years ago, the patent court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, took the increasingly blurry line between what was patentable and what wasn't and erased it.

At issue was a patent held by the Signature Financial Group Inc. for a system that channeled money from mutual funds into a central investment pool.

Under existing law, two things should have invalidated this patent.

First, it was a method of doing business. Previous courts had always held that business methods, like ideas or laws of nature, were not something one could patent. After all, companies already had plenty of incentive to improve their business techniques. If they didn't, they'd lose out to the competition.

But Signature's system wasn't only a method of doing business. It also was a mathematical process using algorithms.

An algorithm is a set of instructions for doing things in a certain order. And if a business plan, like "sell quick, cheap food close to major highways," seems like an idea that can't be patented, then an algorithm had seemed doubly so. Like all forms of math, it had been considered part of the realm of ideas -- as unpatentable as E = mc2.

This time, however, the court said that because Signature's algorithms produced a useful, concrete and tangible result, it could be patented. As for the long-standing exception for business methods, the court found it "ill-conceived."

The ruling amazed intellectual property experts.

"What the Signature system was doing was accounting. It was dividing numbers by other numbers," said Duke University law professor James Boyle.

The number of business-method applications, many of which involved algorithms, rose sevenfold between 1998 and 2001. One patent that quickly became notorious was given to IBM Corp. for a "system and method for providing reservations for restroom use" on airplanes. The method: first come, first served.

For Boyle, we've reached a point where we're "tremblingly close" to patenting ideas.

"You're no longer patenting the corkscrew," he said. "You're patenting the idea of taking the cork out of the bottle so you can drink the wine."

Or, in the case of Patent No. 6,004,596, the idea of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Products Come Together

Jelly has been around for centuries, commercial peanut butter from 1890 and machine-sliced bread since the late 1920s. A decade later, some unknown genius combined all three ingredients to make the quintessential American sandwich.

PB&Js hit it big in the post-war years. The sandwiches weren't too messy, they didn't spoil after a couple of hours in a lunchbox, and they encouraged the consumption of milk.

A PB&J is pretty simple, which didn't stop food companies from trying to make it simpler. One such innovation was premixed peanut butter and jelly, reducing the number of ingredients from three to two. Then Geske and Kretchman came up with the notion of prefabricating the whole thing.

They made a good pair. Geske had been looking for something to do in the winter, when demand for his packaged ice dropped, and Kretchman had some background in selling food to schools. They developed the sandwich at home and then did taste tests at schools.

Incredible Uncrustables was an immediate hit. Not only was the product nutritional and appealing, but it also eliminated the need for the schools to spend time making sandwiches themselves.

An intellectual property attorney helped secure a trademark on the name. The patent came about more casually.

"One attorney said, 'There's nothing here,' and we said OK," Geske recalled. "But a new attorney came in, and he said, 'We can get this through, no problem.' We gave them their fees. It took about a year and a half. "

By the end of 1998, about 50 employees in Fargo were making 35,000 Incredible Uncrustables a day for schoolchildren in eight Midwestern states.

Smucker, the Orrville, Ohio, maker of jams and jellies, realized the sandwich could be a valuable addition to its product line. Smucker bought the company and shortened the name to Uncrustables.

The company also got the patent, which was granted Dec. 21, 1999, for a "sealed crustless sandwich."

"On what basis they granted it, I have no idea," said Geske, who made enough from the sale to Smucker to "take a couple of years off to enjoy the family."

The defendant in the sandwich lawsuit, Albie's, was founded in 1987 by two childhood buddies to sell pasties, which are meat or vegetables baked in dough. In the summer of 2000, the Gaylord, Mich.-based company began selling a peanut butter and jelly sandwich called E.Z. Jammers. It weighed 2.8 ounces, bigger than Smucker's 2-ounce product.

By December, Smucker noticed the E.Z. Jammers and demanded that Albie's stop. Albie's sued to have the patent declared invalid. Smucker then sued Albie's for infringement.

To avoid the expense of a full-blown suit, Albie's asked the patent office for a reexamination, a relatively rare procedure. The best way to get a patent thrown out is by finding examples of so-called prior art -- proof that the patent really didn't offer anything new.

One such piece of evidence suggested by Albie's was a kitchen tool called the Cut-N-Seal. This plunger-type device allowed an individual to seal and crimp a filling between two slices of bread.

To knock down the Cut-N-Seal, a Smucker lawyer filed an affidavit describing how he had tried to use it to make a sandwich that looked as sleek and tidy as an Uncrustable.

The Cut-N-Seal sandwiches, the lawyer said, all had "rupturing problems," particularly in the "upper bread layer." The accompanying photographs showed jelly bursting out all over.

"So what?" said Heinl, the Albie's lawyer. "Anyone can make a defective sandwich."

Although the arguments were narrow, the business implications were large.

"The Uncrustables brand sandwich defines its own market," Smucker said in an affidavit arguing that anything so immediately popular had to be non-obvious and therefore patentable. With sales of 50 million sandwiches a year, it was the firm's fastest-growing product.

The point of the lawsuit was to keep it that way, Heinl said, noting: "They were filing suit to keep Albie's out of the market."

Smucker, which recently solidified its hold on the peanut butter market by buying the Jif brand, is confident the reexamination will help Uncrustables.

"The claims will be narrowed," said attorney Robert Vickers, "but the patent will be a lot stronger."

Patent Office Challenges

Patent officials decline to talk about specific patents, although they note that the most controversial come under review or, like the IBM bathroom patent, are quietly dropped by their owners.

"We grant 170,000 patents a year," said Esther Kepplinger, deputy commissioner of patent operations. "To focus on five, and extrapolate that the overall quality is poor, is unfair."

Yet the agency's director, Rogan, acknowledges that the problems have run deeper.

"Some of the early business-method patents were fairly broad," he said. These led to conflicting claims and lawsuits. "We're much narrower now." And tougher: "We've gone from a 75% acceptance rate to a 75% rejection rate" on those patents. Of course, those early, broad patents are still out there, wreaking havoc.

Rogan hopes to hire 2,500 additional examiners, but his strategic plan to solve the patent crisis also includes outsourcing some of the basic patent search work, saving time and labor. He wants to encourage electronic applications, rescuing a patent office he says is "drowning in paper," and charge applicants higher fees for bigger applications, a move intended to reduce unnecessary patent claims.

Although no patent director has been so ambitious, smaller reforms have failed before. The patent office first promised a paperless office in 1983.

Outside critics believe the problems are more intractable.

In a recent speech, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said a large part of the recent jump in applications "is defensive or strategic patenting."

"You get a patent because [otherwise] someone else will patent it," he said. "Or you get a patent because you would like to block a competitor."

The walls protecting this ever-expanding pool of intellectual property are getting stronger. One reason is the 1982 creation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It handles only patent cases -- and usually rules in favor of the patent holder.

"A specialized court tends to see itself, I think, as a booster of the specialty industry," Posner said.

Last year, the appeals court said the patent office had incorrectly rejected two applications for "obviousness." If an examiner rejects an application using "general knowledge," the court said, that knowledge "must be articulated and placed on the record."

In other words, said deputy commissioner Kepplinger, "we can't reject something just because it's stupid."

The absence of sense seems to figure strongly in the most famous patent of the last few years. Last spring, the patent office issued a patent to Steven Olsen for "a new and improved method of swinging": pulling "first on one chain and then on the other."

Even if you didn't know Steven was 7 years old, the brief and elegantly written application is obviously tongue in cheek, complete with a grand pronouncement that this "invention" will enable "even young users to swing independently and joyously, which is of great benefit to all."

Steven's father, Peter Olson, a patent attorney with 3M Co. who wrote the application, was merely trying to show his son what he did for a living. But the examiner didn't get the joke.

The patent office is searching for documented proof that children have indeed always powered their swinging by pulling on the chains. Then, and only then, will it kill the patent as quietly as possible.

Next: Patent holders battle for control of the Internet.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: STICKY SITUATION: Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by Albie's Foods, left, and J.M. Smucker are subjects of a patent fight. PHOTOGRAPHER: Robert Durell Los Angeles Times PHOTO: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: A worker searches for a file at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Arlington, Va. The office approves three-quarters of the patent applications it receives. PHOTOGRAPHER: Linda Spillers For The Times PHOTO: Blurred Lines: James Rogan, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Arlington, Va., says the agency is in crisis as more corporations seek patents to stifle competition and the courts continue broadening the nature of what is patentable. PHOTOGRAPHER: Reuters

E-Commerce Battles 'Me'-Commerce

A lone patent holder asserts vast rights over shopping on the Web. Others call it extortion.

David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer

Copyright 2003 The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
February87, 2003 Saturday Home Edition

It took seven years and tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, but Lawrence Lockwood was finally awarded U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319 in September 2001.

The former San Diego travel agent believed that the patent, for an "automatic business and financial transaction processing system," gave him significant control over shopping on the Internet.

He promptly sent letters to 100 e-commerce firms, saying they were violating his new patent as well as one from 1996. He politely suggested they buy a license from him for $10,000, although he hinted that the price was negotiable.

Ten companies told him to get lost. The 90 others didn't bother to reply.

"American businesses do not respond when you ask them nicely," Lockwood said.

So he started suing them -- a New Jersey plumbing supply company, a New York ski shop, an Oregon fabric store. This has gotten their attention, and often their money too.

Lockwood's targets complain that he is practicing "legalized extortion," an accusation he denies.

"If you saw someone infringe property rights given you by the U.S. government, what would you do?" he asked. "Move forward and try to enforce your rights? Or just throw them down the drain?"

Lockwood, whose firm is called PanIP, is one of a new group of patent holders who say they own the rights to key Internet technologies. They are blanketing hundreds of small and large Web sites with lawsuits, threats of suits and demands for licensing payments.

A former CIA technology officer is bringing EBay Inc. to trial this spring, claiming that the hugely successful trading site is infringing an online auction patent he applied for in 1995 -- six months before EBay began.

Charles E. Hill & Associates, a software firm, is suing 18 e-commerce companies, including EBay, alleging that they violated its patents on an "electronic-catalog system" and a "method of updating a remote computer."

Acacia Research Corp. in Newport Beach has filed legal complaints against 27 adult entertainment Web sites, alleging that they violated its patents on "the transmission and receipt of digital audio and/or video content." The company is demanding licenses from mainstream music and movie companies too.

All these lawsuits were predictable, said Jonathan Hangartner, a patent lawyer with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in San Diego who represents a group of PanIP defendants.

"Anytime there's a major technological breakthrough, there's a spike in patent litigation," Hangartner said. "It happened with automobiles, telephones, trains. Now it's the Internet's turn."

Proliferation of Patents

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been generous in assigning Internet-related patents, nearly all of which involve systems, procedures or methods of doing things rather than actual physical inventions.

Lockwood's September 2001 patent, for example, outlines how a group of self-service terminals could be connected via telephone to a central processor at a financial institution. The patent, which was filed in 1994, specifies a method of screening loan applications, but in a loose sense the system it describes also resembles the Web.

It is far from the only patent that either touches on the Web or might seem to do so.

"If you're selling online, at the most recent count there are 4,319 patents you could be violating," said David E. Martin, chief executive of M-Cam Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based risk-management firm specializing in patents. "If you also planned to advertise, receive payments for or plan shipments of your goods, you would need to be concerned about approximately 11,000."

Patents used to be far down on a Web merchant's list of worries. A patent, which is essentially a government-sanctioned right to a monopoly on a process or invention, went against the early spirit of the Internet.

"The Web was a freewheeling, low-barrier-to-entry, everyone- can-copy-from-everyone-else place, which was a powerful model that took us a long way," said Tim O'Reilly, a computer manual publisher. "There was a lot of innovation as people got up to the level of their competitors and said, 'What can I do to leapfrog that?' "

These days it can be a better financial model for Internet companies to license patents rather than build something new.

Chicago-based Divine Inc. went public in 2000 as an Internet incubator, a company that would spawn other companies. When that possibility evaporated in the stock market slump, Divine tried to reinvent itself as a software consulting and services firm.

In late 2001, Divine acquired Open Market Inc., an e-commerce trailblazer that had fallen on even harder times. Among Open Market's assets were a number of patents, including one filed in 1994 and granted in 1998 for a "network-based sales system." It resembles that ubiquitous e-commerce tool, the shopping basket.

"The universe of potential infringers is the universe of people doing e-business," said Divine general counsel Jude Sullivan. He said the company had issued about 150 licenses.

Ken Burke, who runs a Web design firm in Petaluma, said Divine started sending cease-and-desist letters to his clients in September.

"Just answering the letters would have required a $60,000 retainer for lawyers," Burke said. So he willingly, even eagerly, paid Divine an undisclosed six-figure fee for a license that covered all 100 of his clients, including Beringer Vineyards, Big Dog Sportswear, Whitman's chocolates and Pet Food Express.

"It kind of stinks," Burke said. "I knew settling would strengthen Divine's case against other people. But it was a good business decision."

He has just one worry.

"We're vulnerable now. We run the risk of being a prime target of PanIP," Lockwood's firm. "When does it stop?"

Few Cases Go to Trial

Lawrence Lockwood has two points he wants to make clear: He's in the top ranks of inventors, and he doesn't understand what all this fuss is about.

When the patent office is deciding whether to issue a patent, it checks the "prior art" -- previously issued patents that are relevant to the current application. It then lists these as references in the new patent. Lockwood says his 1982 patent for a "self-service terminal" has been used as a reference by the patent office 122 times.

"A highly cited patent corresponds to a Nobel Prize winner," he said while eating a sandwich at a Coco's restaurant near the La Jolla house where he grew up and still lives.

Fewer than 5% of patent cases make it to trial. Although some of the rest are dismissed by a judge, most are settled out of court. That was the route taken by the first 10 Web companies Lockwood sued last spring in U.S. District Court in San Diego, alleging they violated his 1996 and 2001 patents on automated sales and processing systems.

"Every one of us was so small," said one of the defendants. "None of us knew about the others. The scheme was beautiful in its simplicity."

The price of a license was supposedly $30,000, but that was just an opening gambit. A few firms settled right off by paying a fraction of that, but five of the companies learned they weren't alone and banded together. They hired a lawyer, set up a Web site. But after six months they too came to terms.

"It became a money thing," said one participant, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the settlement terms forbid him from discussing it. "We gained a lot of efficiency simply by being in a group, but $750,000 to $1 million could still get spilled."

The total probably would have been even greater if the case had gone to court. In 1999, the American Intellectual Property Law Assn. said the average patent infringement case in California cost each party $2 million.

Lockwood took the summer off, then resumed litigation at a fast pace. Between Aug. 30 and Oct. 4, he filed lawsuits against 40 Web sites. Aside from the fact that none was within easy driving distance of the San Diego court, they seemed to have little in common. They ranged from Can-Do National Tape in Nashville, Tenn., to Advanced Battery Systems Inc. in Stoughton, Mass., to Caffe Vita Coffee Roasting Co. in Seattle.

Such a broad spectrum of retailing lends weight to the defendants' assertion that Lockwood claims control of all e-commerce. (PanIP's full name, Pangea Intellectual Properties, might also be a clue here. "Pangea" is Greek for "all of the Earth.")

Lockwood says his patents apply only to a specific segment of online sales. He would not identify it but promises it eventually would be revealed in court.

He won't say much about himself, either. He declined to be photographed or to furnish even such basic information as his age. His desire to keep a low profile was reinforced after online vigilantes electronically harassed him, defacing his Web site.

"It's an elementary school type of thing," he said. "They're also making wild statements. But patent cases are decided in the courts, not in the court of public opinion."

Lockwood graduated from La Jolla High in 1965 and attended three area colleges and universities, pursuing liberal arts studies without receiving a degree. During much of the 1970s, he worked for his father's small travel agency as well as his father's printing shop.

That information comes from depositions in a lawsuit Lockwood filed in the early 1990s against American Airlines, claiming its Sabre reservation system was infringing three patents he had been granted in the early 1980s.

Asked by American's lawyers what he did for a living, Lockwood replied, "I'm currently litigating my patents." For money to eat every day, he added, "I assist my family in leasing office space." He said he had "never, for any length of time, used a personal computer."

The case was dismissed, and significant parts of the patents were invalidated. Lockwood called it "a very expensive learning process."

With the Internet, he said, his contribution was "a layering or improving." In other words, he realized that the early text-only Internet soon would include graphics, and he sought patents in that area. But his interest in the commercial Web is professional, not personal. Lockwood said he doesn't shop online.

One thing his critics are missing, he says, is that he's taking the more restrained path.

"A patent holder can either create a monopoly or he can license," Lockwood said. "What these people would really be crying about is if I said, 'You cannot sell on your Web site whatsoever and I want it discontinued.' "

But for at least one defendant, the lawsuit produced just that result. River City Meat, a Missouri-based wholesaler, pulled down its Web site after getting sued.

Lockwood, of course, doesn't want companies to shut their Web sites. If they do, he doesn't get paid. He suggests they think of his licenses as an inevitable part of doing business, "like their telephone bill or the sign they have in front of their establishment." And if they don't like it, their complaint is really with the system, not him.

James E. Rogan, director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, declined to address specific patents. But he noted that, in general, a claim of infringement is not necessarily true.

"There's a whole cottage industry of shysters out there," he said.

Rogan's advice for those who believe they are being exploited: Get a lawyer.

Lockwood says that's good advice -- for anyone who wants to commit financial suicide.

"Do they really want to spend $1 million and two years of their life to invalidate a patent they can license for a couple of thousand dollars?" he asked. "People get divorced over this stuff. They have strokes over this."

Making a Stand

About half of the 40 latest defendants decided, however unwillingly, that Lockwood had a point and bought licenses for as much as $5,000.

More were on the verge of coming to the same conclusion, until a guy who spent his days making mint meltaways, orange creams, white pecan truffles and breakup bark decided the whole thing stuck in his craw.

Like many small businesses, DeBrand Fine Chocolates was born out of love. Cathy Brand, whose family sold cake-decorating and candy supplies, started making chocolates at age 8. In 1987, when she was 25, she began selling them from her family's Fort Wayne, Ind., home.

Tim Beere was in marketing and advertising when he married Cathy but was drawn into the chocolate business. The couple now has three stores, with a fourth on the way, and a thriving Web operation.

PanIP's lawsuit was delivered to their offices in early September. An accompanying letter, written by Lockwood's lawyer, informed the Beeres that they had 45 days to pay a "very reasonable" and "nonnegotiable" $5,000 for a lifetime license to his patents.

Cathy describes the 43-year-old Tim as the calmer, more easygoing and more patient one in the relationship. The lawsuit upset both of them, but she was the one most inclined to settle. She knew what it would cost to fight it.

Tim Beere may be as relaxed as his wife says, but he didn't like being pushed around.

"It was like a bully promising a little kid, 'I'll protect you if you give me your lunch money,' " he said. "These patents don't apply to our Web site. No person I've talked to seems to even think it's a possibility."

Proving this, however, would be arduous. To make sure the Beeres knew it, Lockwood included some news clippings with his letter and lawsuit. "Supreme Court Bolsters Protections for Patents," read a headline in the Los Angeles Times.

Tim Beere did some research on the Web. He learned about some of the defendants -- the ones who tried to fight back. He hired their lawyer, Hangartner of Sheppard, Mullin. He began calling the other defendants, introducing himself, laboriously stitching together a defense group of 15 companies. He became a little obsessed. He would wake in the middle of the night, stewing.

The Beeres set up a Web site, first called PANIPdefendants .net and then Youmaybenext .com, which offered information about PanIP's lawsuit and solicited donations. Lockwood's response was to sue the Beeres again, this time for trademark infringement and defamation.

Tim Beere says he is undaunted.

"My goal is to send a message that one person can stand up for what's right and make a difference. Imagine how much better things could be if more people believed that," he said.

The patent infringement case is getting ready to begin its long trip through the courts. The defamation and trademark case has been narrowed but continues as well.

Lockwood is serene.

"If I win, I have a patent that has been validated by the court system," he said. "It will be a very powerful weapon. And if they win, they get nothing. Absolutely nothing."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO: INTERNET BATTLE: DeBrand Fine Chocolate owners Cathy and Tim Beere declined to pay PanIP a $5,000 license fee for the company's Web site and plan to fight the patent case in court. PHOTOGRAPHER: Clint Keller For The Times PHOTO: SET FOR COURT: Chocolatier Tim Beere is battling allegations that he infringed Lawrence Lockwood's patents. PHOTOGRAPHER: Clint Keller For The Times