About four years ago, I got a phone call from a law firm in Pittsburgh asking me if I was the same Ed Tittel who wrote HTML For Dummies. When I of course replied “Yes,” my interlocutor — let’s call him “Alex” — proceeded to open up an extraordinarily interesting can of worms for my inspection. It seems I wrote the first edition of this book long enough ago — it shows a copyright date of 1995, but was actually released in December of 1994 — that it predated the filing of some patents related to Web technology and e-commerce that had become the focus of a lawsuit that alleged their infringement. I’m not at liberty to disclose the identities of the parties involved, other than to say we had some huge online retailers on the defendants’ side, and a company that specialized in “mining the value of its IP” (intellectual property) on the other side.
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