>valued them at easily over $100 million if used to sue a number of major companies, including Facebook. I'd like to believe that I've created a lot of economic good in my life, but not that much //
That's not how market based capitalism works though. The valuation is based on the valuation of FB which is based on the ability to drive a market to exchange shares at a particular value. In effect the company behind the shares is irrelevant as possessing the shares, or borrowing them, can turn a profit for traders whether the company is successful or not.
In this sort of economy you're riding on FB's coat tails. If FB crashes or booms that doesn't make your contribution and different in real value to mankind but it makes the value in currency of your contribution fluctuate.
>if you succeed in being bought out, they will pass out of your power //
Only if you choose to give them up in that way. Also they'd only pass like that if they're owned by the company anyway, in which case they're not your patents. If you sold them to the company then you could have made conditions on the sale or simply licensed the patent instead.
>Then OpenID came along, solved it in the same way that I did //
I struggled to understand the link because both of US7774612 and US8209541 appear in their main claims (1) to use a shared secret and I wasn't aware this was an optional component of OpenID (eg http://openid.net/pres/protocolflow-1.1.png). In the first of the patents '12 does the existing storage on the first server of "usernames" for authentication with both servers match with OpenID? It seems to require that the OpenID trust provider would have to hold information on the site to be accessed (consumer) prior to initiation of the request by the user? That is for example, to post a comment on blogger.com my OpenID provider would need to have a blogger.com username already stored before my request for authentication.
As an aside do you believe the claimed invention was both novel and non-obvious at the time at which you received the patent? Do you think the company was spurred on by the idea of receiving a patent, if they haven't used the patent to license out the process then why didn't they make a defensive publication instead do you suppose?
I was not informed of the exact analysis by which it was decided that they were infringing.
I do know that the technique was sufficiently non-obvious that at the time the various single sign-on solutions that were being pushed (eg Microsoft's Hailstorm) relied on having a single central authentication mechanism rather than having a method for allowing for multiple authentication providers.
In short while I don't personally think that a patent should have been offered for that, I do think that it is a much stronger patent than many other software patents. If I had my life to do over, though, I'd have more strongly objected to that patent than I did at the time. (It came very, very close to being sucked up by some patent trolls and used to sue everyone. Luckily the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing, and while one person was getting it evaluated, another one sold it into a defensive patent pool. Whew.)
The patent was taken out because it was something that they thought was patentable, and they wanted to have patents to their name. It was used in a product that allowed us to deep link to a partner, and have people arrive already logged in from our link.
Unfortunately the time it takes to get patents is so long that long before the patent was awarded, that product was discontinued and both authors had moved on to other employers. Indeed this was true by the time that the patent office came back with its first review.
That's not how market based capitalism works though. The valuation is based on the valuation of FB which is based on the ability to drive a market to exchange shares at a particular value. In effect the company behind the shares is irrelevant as possessing the shares, or borrowing them, can turn a profit for traders whether the company is successful or not.
In this sort of economy you're riding on FB's coat tails. If FB crashes or booms that doesn't make your contribution and different in real value to mankind but it makes the value in currency of your contribution fluctuate.
>if you succeed in being bought out, they will pass out of your power //
Only if you choose to give them up in that way. Also they'd only pass like that if they're owned by the company anyway, in which case they're not your patents. If you sold them to the company then you could have made conditions on the sale or simply licensed the patent instead.
>Then OpenID came along, solved it in the same way that I did //
I struggled to understand the link because both of US7774612 and US8209541 appear in their main claims (1) to use a shared secret and I wasn't aware this was an optional component of OpenID (eg http://openid.net/pres/protocolflow-1.1.png). In the first of the patents '12 does the existing storage on the first server of "usernames" for authentication with both servers match with OpenID? It seems to require that the OpenID trust provider would have to hold information on the site to be accessed (consumer) prior to initiation of the request by the user? That is for example, to post a comment on blogger.com my OpenID provider would need to have a blogger.com username already stored before my request for authentication.
As an aside do you believe the claimed invention was both novel and non-obvious at the time at which you received the patent? Do you think the company was spurred on by the idea of receiving a patent, if they haven't used the patent to license out the process then why didn't they make a defensive publication instead do you suppose?