"PersonalWeb protects its proprietary business applications and operations through a portfolio of patents that it owns, and we are actively pursuing licensing and participation in the operation of businesses that use these patents," said Michael Weiss, CEO of PersonalWeb, in a statement. Peter Black, senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology, said that while he had not closely assessed the merits of the case, if successful the damages would be "substantial". Mark Summerfield, a senior associate at Watermark in Melbourne who is a patent law specialist, said going by similar cases the damages claims will be "at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars per defendant". However, Black worried that patents in the technology sector were "very broad", making infringement "almost inevitable" as new products are developed (e.g. the Samsung vs. Apple litigation). "An increasingly common trend is to use patent litigation as a business model - companies use patent lawsuits (or the threat of patent lawsuits) as leverage to enter into license arrangements with competitors," said Black.

Weiss could not be reached for comment today while Bermeister declined to comment as he is a witness in the case. Google and EMC both refused to comment as the case is before the courts. PersonalWeb says it has used the patents to develop related technologies such as an online collaboration platform for students dubbed StudyBods. The patents also form the basis of Global File Registry, a technology that Bermeister and his team have been pitching to ISPs and police agencies as a way of combatting online piracy and child pornography. The technology is able to recognise millions of known pirated content and child pornography files and when users search for such files on peer-to-peer services, is able to offer a paid, legal version of the content or , in the case of child pornography, a law enforcement message. Before Kazaa and Global File Registry, Bermeister created the video games distributor Ozisoft in 1982 and in 1994 he established the now-defunct $70 million interactive Sega World theme park in Sydney. He was also a founding investor in Skype. In the complaint against Google and YouTube, seen by this website, PersonalWeb alleges that the core services provided by the companies infringe its patents around identifying, processing, distributing and controlling access to data online.

Almost identical claims are made against the other web giants. PersonalWeb has produced a document, seen by this website, which claims each of the companies it targeted have in fact cited PersonalWeb's patents in their own patents several times, but have not paid licensing fees. "Google had prior knowledge of at least one of the patents-in-suit and the patented technology because they were cited in several of Google's own patent applications," the complaint against Google reads. PersonalWeb is asking for a jury trial and ultimately, damages. Summerfield said while he was not an expert on US patent law, the Texas court chosen by PersonalWeb was "most-renowned as the preferred venue for so-called patent trolls" - the term used to describe companies that buy patents in order to sue and obtain fees from alleged infringers rather than develop a product. He questioned whether it was an attempt to extract fees out of "a stack of really big companies with deep pockets". "After all, if you genuinely have an innovative new technology that is supposedly going to be clearly differentiated in the market, why would you need to sue only the biggest names in the business for doing what they are already doing," said Summerfield.

PersonalWeb has gone to great pains to point out the products it has attempted to develop using the patents. Summerfield said he was unable to comment on the merits of the case as that would involved hours of analysis. However, he said on the currently available evidence "it is very unclear whether PersonalWeb's primary business model is as a developer of innovative online services and solutions, or as a patent-holding company seeking to derive income from patent licensing and/or enforcement". Separately, another Australian inventor, Ric Richardson, has been battling Microsoft in a different patent infringement case. Uniloc, which owns Richardson's patent around product activation, was awarded $US388 million by a US jury in 2008 after Microsoft was found to infringe the patent. On appeal, the infringement verdict was upheld, but the case has been sent back to the original court for a recalculation of the damages, still expected to be an extremely substantial amount. This reporter is on Twitter: @ashermoses