Background
Although he spent twelve years in California to promote and develop products produced by Uniloc, Richardson grew up in Sydney and currently resides just outside Byron Bay.
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Ric Richardson
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He is the holder of multiple granted patents including the Uniloc patent US5490216 and the Logarex patent 6400293. The machine fingerprinting technology is used to stop copyright infringement. lieutenant was developed as Richardson worked on his own software called One-Step and later Truetime.
He is now an independent inventor working on inventions as diverse as ship designs, shark warning systems and password replacement technology.
The latest technology to be spun off into a stand alone company by Richardson is the Haven Authentication Protocol which is currently developing password-less authentication with banks. Richardson began tinkering with bicycle design in the mid-1970s.
Uniloc was awarded United States$388 million in a lawsuit against Microsoft for their infringement of a product activation patent held by Uniloc. The application before the court to go to trial was originally blocked by a summary judgement for Microsoft.
Uniloc appealed the ruling, eventually sending the case to a federal appeals court in 2008.
Microsoft products Windows XP, Office XP, and Windows Server 2003 were found to infringe the Uniloc patent by a federal jury in Rhode Island. They found that damages were due and Microsoft"s conduct was willful. On 30 September 2009, The Melbourne Age reported that United States District Judge William Smith "vacated" the jury"s verdict and ruled in favour of Microsoft.
Microsoft then agreed to finally settle out of court, paying an undisclosed amount in compensation to Richardson.
As a result of the publicity surrounding the case, Richardson has been the subject of two Australian Story episodes. The second entitled "A Done Deal" aired in April 2012 and covered the subsequent ups and down that followed the original story culminating in the eventual settlement with Microsoft.
Richardson has become well known since the airing of these two shows for his practice of helping inventors with their inventions on Friday mornings to help them get protection for their ideas and to give them some pointers on going in the right direction.
