Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Tim Berners-Lee fights subpoena from Barnes & Noble

By Eric Convey, Boston Business Journal

The Father of the Internet is fighting to stay out of a legal case between Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS) and Alcatel Lucent USA Inc. over technology related to the Nook e-book reader.

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee filed a motion in U.S. District Court Tuesday seeking to quash a subpoena from Barnes & Noble in the case, which is playing out in federal court in New York. Barnes & Noble wants a declaration from the court stating that neither the Nook, nor barnesandnoble.com, infringes on Alcatel Lucent USA patents.

A lawyer for Barnes & Noble, in a July 2011 letter that is included as an exhibit with Berners-Lee’s motion, says his testimony is needed because Alcatal Lucent and predecessors Bell Labs and AT&T have “asserted (their) patents are directly responsible for the creation and success of the World Wide Web.”

The letter adds that Berners-Lee’s testimony is necessary to “establish the facts of how the Web was developed.”

Berners-Lee argues that Barnes & Noble is not interested in his expertise but is trying to compel him to testify “simply because he is such a luminary in the world of the Internet and the World Wide Web” and could “add luster” to Barnes & Noble’s arguments in court.

“Barnes & Noble claims that it seeks Professor Berners-Lee’s testimony merely as a fact witness,” Berners-Lee’s motion states. “But Professor Berners-Lee has no factual knowledge whatsoever about the matters in dispute in this litigation.”

Berners-Lee’s motion goes on to state: “Even if Barnes & Noble sought only limited factual information from Professor Berners-Lee, the subpoena must be quashed as unduly burdensome for him, given the extent of his worldwide professional obligations and the fact that Barnes & Noble can obtain such factual information from many other sources.”

The brief also states that Berners-Lee “has no opinion or information” pertaining to the patents at issue.

Berners-Lee is a professor at the MIT and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, which promulgates standards that govern the Internet.

In an affidavit filed as part of his motion, Berners-Lee offers some interesting information about how busy life can be for a man whose technological work got him knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Berners-Lee was out of the country on business 110 days in 2010, making trips to Africa, Belgium, Slovakia, Germany, Denmark, Wales, Poland, France, Mexico and Brazil, he wrote. In 2011, he wrote, he was out of the country 99 days for work in countries including Brazil, Saudi Arabia and and India, he wrote.

He said that for some speeches, he gets a fee that is “a significant amount.”