Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Infonautics, Inc. (Nasdaq: INFO) was an American internet information-services company founded in 1992 and incorporated in Pennsylvania in November 1992. It was co-founded by Marvin Weinberger, Lawrence Husick, and Josh Kopelman as a spin-out of Telebase, Inc., and was headquartered in Wayne, Pennsylvania (later listed at King of Prussia, PA). It completed a roughly $29 million IPO in May 1996 and reached about 200 employees, but was never sustainably profitable: FY2000 revenue was $11.2 million against a $14.3 million net loss, and headcount had been cut sharply. It was delisted in 2001 and acquired by Tucows Inc. through a reverse merger completed August 28, 2001, after which the entity was renamed Tucows Inc. It no longer exists as an independent company.
Products/operations. Infonautics built online reference services before the commercial web matured. Its flagship was Electric Library, a subscription research service offering full-text newspapers, newswires, magazines, and broadcast transcripts through natural-language and Boolean search. Related offerings included Homework Helper (on Prodigy), Encyclopedia.com, and the "Sleuth" content-notification sites (CompanySleuth, JobSleuth, Entertainment Sleuth). In 1999 it spun its K–12 and public-library business into bigchalk.com (Bell & Howell), retaining the end-user Electric Library business.
Litigation posture. The single tracked case shows Infonautics as a defendant only (0 plaintiff, 1 defendant), consistent with an operating company being attacked rather than a patent assertion entity. David H. Judson v. Infonautics, Inc. (1:01-cv-10464, D. Mass., filed March 19, 2001) was a patent suit brought by individual asserter David H. Judson, per the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, asserting U.S. Patent Nos. 5,572,643; 5,722,067; 5,737,619; 6,157,823; and 6,185,586. The case terminated June 4, 2001. Venue was Massachusetts, not a plaintiff-friendly Texas district.
Context. Infonautics' own patent portfolio later became notable: BTG International acquired patents developed at Infonautics covering internet affiliate-program tracking and announced plans to commercialize or enforce them, and Tucows stated it assigned various Infonautics-acquired patents to a third party in 2002. Tucows sold Electric Library and Encyclopedia.com to Alacritude/HighBeam in 2002.
David H. Judson sued Infonautics, Inc. in the District of Massachusetts. The '643 patent was asserted along with U.S. patents 5,722,067, 5,737,619, 6,157,823, and 6,185,586. The case was terminated on June 4, 2001.