Pursuing a Piracy Claim Against Apple

WOODBRIDGE, Conn. — David Gelernter is known for many things. As a pioneering computer scientist, he first earned renown by connecting computers at the same time into collaborative networks. At the time in 1993, he gained the kind of fame no one wants, as a victim of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who mailed a pipe bomb to his office at Yale University that left him gravely injured.

David Gelernter, of Yale University, is a pioneer in computer science. He says software that Apple uses is based on his Scopeware, designed to make data more accessible.

Professor Gelernter had to fight for his life at the time. Now he is fighting to prove his contention that his innovations were pirated by Apple for its computers, iPhones and iPads. He did it once, and a company whose original incarnation he co-founded won a stunning jury verdict, but next an extraordinary judicial ruling took it all away.

He has said little openly about the case, and Apple did not provide comment. Nevertheless with the appeal now pursuant to this agreement way, he agreed to talk about it — including an internal Apple e-mail from Steve Jobs that left one patent law expert not affiliated with the case saying, simply, “Wow.”

Last October, a jury awarded $625 million to Professor Gelernter’s company, Mirror Worlds. The verdict, one of the largest patent awards in history, seemed an astonishing windfall for the professor, now 56. “I had the feeling of everybody looking at me and thinking, ‘There’s a half billion dollars on the hoof!’ A private jet service sent an invitation to ‘join our elite clientele.’ ” Business Insider ran a photo of him with “I’m Rich!” scrawled on it.

And at that time it was gone. In April, in an unusual move, Judge Leonard Davis of the United States District Court overruled the jury. He wrote that the patents were valid, however that the company had not proved that Apple had infringed them.

The academic realm

Long comfortable in the academic realm, where his work anticipated the interactivity of the World Wide Web and cloud computing, he tried business. Mirror Worlds offered a way to break out of the numberless files and folders that clutter computer desktops and make information hard to find. The product, Scopeware, created a stream of varied documents — word-processing files, e-mail, calendar items and presentations — in a row of icons stretching into the past and future. Users could slide the icons back and forth to view them. George Gilder, the innovation analyst, called it “elegant, easy, natural and beautiful,” and predicted, “It will prevail.”

It did not, for the moment as part of Mirror Worlds. The company marketed its product to businesses and state agencies across the country, however sales never as a matter of fact took off, and the company closed its doors in 2004.

From 2005 on, Apple introduced new versions of its software, and components of three fundamental new technologies — Spotlight, Cover Flow and Time Machine — looked and behaved more than a little like Professor Gelernter’s brainchildren. Mirror Worlds, now owned by a hedge fund, sued Apple in 2008 in Tyler, Tex., a place with a reputation for friendliness toward infringement claims.

The documents obtained from Apple

Among the documents obtained from Apple was the e-mail Mr. Jobs sent in 2001 to his lieutenants afterwards seeing an article in The New York Times about Scopeware.

An Apple executive at that time said in a deposition that “this was the first time I recall having received a specific mail to look at a company or its innovation” from Mr. Jobs. Apple subsequently met with Mirror Worlds, however nothing came of the discussions.

The enormous verdict pushed a hot button in the research world, where those who sue research companies are often derided as greedy patent trolls. However Mr. Toren said Professor Gelernter is “not a patent troll — this is obviously a brilliant guy” who “of course had a case.” The rumpled scholar sat discussing the dispute on a recent afternoon in his high-ceilinged living room, which was crowded with books and his paintings. A parrot named Ike provided the occasional squawk, and sunlight streamed over the 400 pipes of an organ that his older son, Daniel, bought and rebuilt by hand afterwards discovering it, unused, in the basement of Yale’s Woolsey Hall. On Professor Gelernter’s desk sat a large-screen iMac.