Professor David Gelernter is a pioneering computer scientist who earned renown by connecting computers together into collaborative networks. He has claimed since 2008 that Apple, Inc. pirated his technology - ironically Apple head Steve Jobs claimed in a new biography that Google had pirated Apple technology, which had to have made old guys at Xerox PARC giggle, since the original Mac OS was so pirated they even wrote the business plan on Xerox computers at Xerox PARC.
Last October, a jury agreed and awarded $625 million to Gelernter’s company, Mirror Worlds but then Judge Leonard Davis of the United States District Court strangely overruled the jury. Spotlight, Cover Flow and Time Machine looked and behaved more than a little like Professor Gelernter’s brainchildren at Mirror World's when Apple introduced them in 2005, after Mirror Worlds went out of business, and so the lawsuit began.
Among the documents obtained from Apple was an e-mail Mr. Jobs sent in 2001 to fellow Apple folks after seeing an article in The New York Times about Scopeware, the software made by Mirror Worlds. “Please check out this software ASAP,” he wrote. “It may be something for our future, and we may want to secure a license ASAP.”
When Joseph Diamante, the lead lawyer for Mirror Worlds, called Gelernter about the judges decision to overturn the judgment Gelernter said, “Joe, I’ve been through worse.”
How so? In June 1993, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, mailed a pipe bomb to his office at Yale University, which blinded Gelernter in one eye and severely damaged his right hand, which he covers with a glove. He suffered extensive internal injuries as well and a legacy of surgeries and chronic pain.
So in this instance, Jobs wins:
Jobs 1 - Unabomber 0
Pursuing a Piracy Claim Against Apple by John Schwartz, The New York Times
