Administrative Remedy?

Just to give you some perspective, according to The Guiness Book of World Records, In Search of Lost Time, a novel by Marcel Proust is the longest Novel ever written at 4,211 pages long. So far I have produced around 110,000 pages of hard copy evidence for CANVS-V-USA (not counting soft copy materials).

Over the past ten years I have gone over the same material so many times that my ability to find documents in a Multi-Terabyte database is faster than any search database yet created to extract contextual relationships between events, Agencies, individuals, dates, etc (I also got used to my eyes bleeding every time I look at the material, well not entirely used to it...). I guess living through it and generating every page of the documentation gives me a unique insight into the material. The reason that I have had to revisit the same material over and over and over is that if you read through all of the 22 boxes of hard copy (that is 110,000 pages if you are counting, that is about 41 time longer than the 2,700 page Obama Care Bill, not to mention all of the soft copy evidence...) I turned over to the Court, one would have to be very technically and tactically literate to fully understand and appreciate the true meaning of the material in question, AND RETAIN EVERY DETAIL IN THE 110,000+ pages. In the Intelligence Community this is the difference between raw intelligence, and an intelligence briefing or a final product.

This should be a pretty straight forward case, I have a patent, many devices purchased by the US Government are infringing on that patent, the Government has indemnified the Companies from Patent Infringement, The Court of Federal Claims has the Jurisdiction to pay me a "reasonable royalty" for the use of my invention.

A few months back the Markman Hearing was scheduled for July 2012, it has now been moved to December 2012. This may just be a scheduling issue but with the stroke of a pen the Government gets an additional six months. The Government has monolithic Agencies on its side with positions that stay the same for the most part, BUT the individuals in the positions change depending on the direction of the political wind, or who got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. By moving the hearing to December, the Government will know if the current administration will be in office for another four years, or if they get to walk away and let a new team take the case (nice work if you can get it...). I am pretty sure the Judge will be the same, but if there is a new administration one can reasonably expect that the Attorney General will be a new Political Appointee. Of course on my side of this fight it is me and the two other stock holders in CANVS, and I don't know about you but today versus six months from today is a pretty big deal.

One might think that after living through this for the last twelve years that I might be used to it or at least built up an immunity to it, but for me Bureaucratic stupidity is like Cyanide, there is no building up an immunity to it.

Before being forced to obtain lawyers and file a patent infringement case against the USA in The Court of Federal Claims, I personally spent over a decade trying to settle this Administratively without invoking lawyers. Here is a list of my efforts to avoid having to go to court:

• Army Material Command Bid Level Protest
• Office of Management and Budget Protest
• Letter to the Secretary of The Army (who directed the matter to Mr. Alan P. Klein Intellectual Property Counsel of the Army U. S. Army Legal Services Agency)
• An Army Administrative Claim
• An Army Administrative Claim Re-Examination
• An Armed Services Board of Contracts Appeal

All of those efforts took around five years. For five years prior to that I was trying a number of other informal means of solving the issue to no avail. On January 5, 2005 there was a prebidders conference at Fort Belvoir's Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate that I attended. Shortly after the meeting the Army granted a $560,000,000 sole source contract to IT&T Night Vision for the Enhanced Night Vision Goggle (ENVG). It was after the 05JAN05 meeting that I started my formal Administrative Action campaign to try and resolve the problem.

My advise to anyone who has a problem with technology stolen by Uncle Sam is to find a lawyer and go directly to the US Court of Federal Claims (a word of caution, you had better be prepared for the fall out). I chose the route that I chose for a number of reasons.

1) I was hoping that I might actually have a chance of solving the problem Administratively (I don't know what I was thinking, oh yea I remember now, I thought there might be some integrity left in the system...).

2) I wanted to give the Government every opportunity to solve the problem prior to my invoking Lawyers.

3) I didn't have the monetary resources to stage this battle in court.

4) I really did believe that if I found a technically literate person who was rational and had any integrity that after looking at the evidence they would agree with me and we could settle on a reasonable licensing fee.

Instead I was simply battered around Administratively for over a decade (no wonder I feel like i got run over by a truck...). Well like they, "Christmas is coming".