An Inventor’s Court Win Over Microsoft Took Years—at What Cost?

Inventor Michael Kaufman finally got his big payday, 22 years after coming up with the idea for a technology patent and 10 years after he saw Microsoft Corp. was infringing it.

After years of settlement talks, patent validity proceedings, a jury trial, and an appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Kaufman secured a $10 million award for his invention, a user-friendly interface for interacting with complex computer databases that Microsoft infringed with a software development program.

For Kaufman, the experience was a crash course in the challenges—time, money, and resources—inventors face in protecting their ideas ...