Jim Logan is an archetype in the patent world—he personifies the great American invention story. In 1996, Logan says, he had a brilliant idea: a digital music player that would automatically update with new episodes. Think iPod, five years before the iPod.

"Our product concept, which spawned the patent, was all about a handheld MP3 player that could download off the Internet some kind of personalized audio experience," he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in an April interview. "We designed that, we prototyped it, we went to investors trying to raise money to produce the product, and we were not successful."

His young company, PersonalAudio Inc., soon went under. Logan blew $1.6 million of his own money, never making a sale. There was nothing left but patents. In 2003, his troubles multiplied: the Securities and Exchange Commission came after him over insider trading charges, leading to him paying nearly $600,000 in penalties and interest. Through it all, Logan kept those patents and waited.

A few years later, "monetizing" patents through lawsuits turned into an industry of its own. Logan turned his patents into a powerhouse licensing machine, beginning with a case filed against Apple in 2009. He went to trial and won $8 million. Settlements with other industry giants, like Samsung and Amazon, followed.

Logan's demands have grown since. Because of the patents he filed in the 1990s, Logan says he's entitled to a cut of revenues for a huge swath of online media. He has famously claimed his patents foretold podcasting, but Logan's lawyers now claim the same patent that covers podcasting covers "episodic content" and is infringed by online video.

Now he's facing a high-stakes jury trial against CBS, the first of three big television networks he sued. In a federal court in Marshall, Texas—famous for patent cases—Logan will have to convince a jury that his demands are justified.

Those hoping for change in the patent system will certainly be watching. Logan occupies a unique role in the universe of litigious patent-holders sometimes derided as "patent trolls." To some, he's one of a few poster children for abuse of the system: demanding cash from small and large businesses alike, over patents that never should have been issued. But to defenders of the current system, Logan is something of a hero, one of a few "independent inventors" willing to stand up to anti-patent zealotry and fight for the value of the patent system as a whole. He has spoken about his patent rights to National Public Radio, the CBC, and went into the "Lion's Den" to do a Q&A on Slashdot.

Even though he's demanding cash payments from a huge chunk of the Web, many are glad to see Logan go public as someone who's not a "troll," but rather an entrepreneur who deserves a second chance.

Logan is "intent on building a business like the very successful one he had previously built on the back of patents," wrote Joff Wild, the editor of Intellectual Asset Management. "It did not work out and Logan lost a lot of money. In the end, though, the patents he was granted allowed him to make good on his investment... He still dreams of creating another technology company that will build things and provide employment to hundreds of people... It's difficult to believe that the US president and assorted members of Congress would really want to stop him."

Most remarkable is that Logan has unapologetically, and publicly, defended both his inventions and his actions. Now, he'll have to do so in court, and under oath.

Logan declined to speak to Ars for this article. "My lawyer recommends against talking to the press at this time," he said via e-mail.



A proud inventor

Before he founded PersonalAudio Inc., Logan, now 59, was already a successful technology executive. A graduate of Dartmouth business school, Logan founded MicroTouch systems in 1983. His company grew into a major maker of early touch-screen devices, like cash registers and "multimedia kiosks." By 1995, MicroTouch had seen years of steady profits and earned more than $75 million in annual sales. Logan made $125,000 plus a bonus of $42,500 that year, and he owned a few million dollars in stock options.

The following year, Logan left to found PersonalAudio, seeking to make a digital player that would host an early podcasting system. Logan says he spent $1.6 million of his own money on it, but it didn't win investors' favor. It soon became clear Logan's idea wasn't working out. The company pivoted to a mail-order cassettes business, but that soon went under as well. Logan and his co-inventors, one of whom was also his patent attorney, filed patent applications describing playlists that would be downloaded "to some kind of e-media player," he told the CBC. "Again, it was a way to organize a personalized experience." He continued:

Another variant on the idea was what is called podcasting today, where someone would produce periodic or episodic content, store it in some location online, and then listeners would have an app or some sort of piece of software that would know where to go look for this content. When they got online, that piece of software would automatically go search for the latest episodes that hadn't been listened to, download them to the device, and when the person was offline later they'd always have the latest and greatest stuff to listen to.

Logan thought up something like an iPod and something like podcasting. He didn't ultimately make any of it, but Logan doesn't hesitate to claim credit for it. Podcasting was only created in 2003 "in terms of a mass market, with publicly available content," Logan said. "The invention was really in 1996."

"Why do you feel you're entitled to this compensation, when other people have developed the technology that's used today?" asked the CBC interviewer.

Logan answered:

Well, bandwidth has increased. Audio quality is better. The amount of content is better. But that's a bit like saying the person who invents the car isn't entitled to licensing fees 15 years later, because now it has a four-wheel drive, and it has all these fancy features. You know, technology does move on. But that doesn't mean the people who invent the basic concepts shouldn't be rewarded for their contribution early on. This whole idea of trying to link a patent with a deliverable product is a very dangerous concept. Once you start going down that road, it changes everything.

In 2001, Logan's first company, MicroTouch, was sold to 3M for $153 million. But this didn't go smoothly for Logan either—that's when, in 2003, he was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for insider trading related to the sale. Logan had acquired an extra 14,000 shares of MicroTouch while negotiations were underway and made $177,375 in what the SEC called insider trading profits. Without admitting wrongdoing, Logan agreed to pay $581,536.27 in penalties and interest.