VIDEO NOTE: The video above is from David's original story on this issue.
A man who claims Big Tech companies trampled on his patents to grab trillions of dollars in advertising revenues filed suit Monday against former federal government officials for allegedly violating his due-process rights.
Spurred by a major decision in June at the U.S. Supreme Court -- which found that a federal patent review board’s procedures violated the Constitution -- David Hoyle sued former U.S. Patent Office Director Michelle Lee and five patent judges who allegedly played a role in stripping him of potentially lucrative internet advertising patents.
Hoyle’s claims have their roots in the New Orleans area. In the 1990s, Hoyle worked at his kitchen table in Destrehan, La., and invented a specific process to target advertising to individual users of the newly invented internet based on what they searched for online. Hoyle’s company, Big Easy Technology, was granted several U.S. patents for targeted online advertising.
But Hoyle alleges that Google infringed on those patents while Lee was the head of the company’s office of patent strategy. U.S. Patent Office records show that Google’s initial effort to get its own patent for targeted online advertising was rejected in 2006, in part because Hoyle already held patents for the kind of software Google sought to develop.
Hoyle alleges in a separate federal lawsuit in Delaware that Google ignored the rejection and started developing targeted online advertising anyway. And when Hoyle and BE Technology tried to challenge Google and other Big Tech firms using similar targeted advertising, Hoyle’s patents went before a federal board created in 2011 called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or PTAB, in 2015.
By that point, Lee, the former head of Google’s patent strategy, had been appointed director of the U.S. Patent Office by President Barack Obama. In the lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Memphis, Tenn., Hoyle alleges the PTAB review panels were stacked against him and other small inventors with judges who rarely, if ever, upheld patents that were challenged by Big Tech companies.
A report earlier this year by Bloomberg News found that the PTAB’s review process had killed more than 2,000 patents since 2012, earning it the nickname the “Patent Death Squad.” The U.S. government has defended the tribunal’s efforts to protect against “patent trolls,” people without legitimate inventions who seek to tie up the patent system and force real businesses to pay them for the right to develop new technology.
Neither Lee nor Google has responded to multiple requests for comment since March.