Despite his low profile, Mr Richardson, who divides his time between Sydney and Huntington Beach, California, is the inventor of dozens of patents. Recent projects include adapting the carbon scrubbing technology found in submarines to car exhaust pipes and collaborating with friend and Nobel nominee Peter Rentzepis, from the University of California, on the use of lasers to achieve atomic level computing. "Ric is scarily intelligent, and he works crazy hours," Brad Davis, chief executive of Uniloc USA, said. "He's the kind of guy who can become an expert on something in about eight seconds."

The son of a freelance cameraman, Mr Richardson began inventing early, experimenting in the mid 1970s with bicycle design. "I would disappear into Dad's garage, putting different forks on the front of Dragsters and cutting off bicycle seats and putting on motorcycle handlebars and trying only a back brake." He had, without knowing, invented the BMX. "Then one day I opened American Dirt Bike magazine and saw a BMX and realised that I'd been beaten to it. I ask them if I could at least be BMX's Australian distributor, but a container of bikes cost $8000, and Mum and Dad weren't willing to give me that."

In his early teens, he alternated between teaching guitar and helping his father on shoots. "Dad was a stringer cameraman for the ABC. Whenever stories broke outside the normal hours, they would call us. As soon as I was strong enough, Dad had me going out at 3am with him, lugging around the old reel-to-reel tape recorders." After school, Mr Richardson combined his love of music with his knowledge of sound equipment and a burgeoning interest in computer programming, eventually becoming the recording industry's go-to guy for computer music. Developing software for synthesisers, he began working for Albert's Studios and Rhinoceros Studios, and for acts as varied as INXS and John Denver.

He also developed, with his brother, the "shade saver cords" used to attach sunglasses to the wearer's neck. The invention made them hundreds of thousands of dollars. "Even better, it meant we could go up and down the east coast on sales trips, with the sales paying for our surf trip." Proceeds from shade saver went into Mr Richardson's next venture, the anti-piracy technology that would ultimately become Uniloc. "Uniloc was so new that when I went to demonstrate it to a big software executive in Sydney in 1992, the guy thought I was faking it. He said, 'How dare you!' He simply couldn't believe it." Far from being a phony, Mr Richardson is, according to longtime supporter Jim Revitt, "a man of extraordinarily high principle … He is a natural born creative thinker with the courage to follow his instincts."

Others aren't so sure. "I am sceptical of software patenting in general," Nic Suzor, from Electronic Frontiers Australia, says. "While not wanting to comment on the Uniloc case … I can say that people have increasingly been using frivolous software patents to get windfall profits for trivial inventions." Mr Richardson is unconcerned. "Once you do something that you think is obvious and then realise that not only is it not obvious, but that people think you are making it up, you realise that you can do anything. And that's seriously exciting."