Little Las Vegas patent firm takes on tech giants

By Steve Kanigher

Thursday, May 20, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Few Las Vegas businessmen can boast that they’ve taken on more giants of industry than Synchrome Technology President Robert Werbicki.

Synchrome, a patent holding company, has filed lawsuits in federal courts in Texas, Delaware and Georgia against some of the biggest names in computers and electronics. They include Apple, IBM, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Pioneer, Teac, Memorex, TDK, Iomega, Philips, Samsung, LG, Toshiba and Panasonic.

On Monday, Microsoft and NEC were added to that list in a lawsuit Synchrome filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas.

Synchrome is seeking damages from those companies for allegedly infringing on two patents it holds on technology with the lengthy title: “Method and Apparatus for Allowing Communication Between a Host Computer and At Least Two Storage Devices Over a Single Interface.”

In other words, it’s a way of connecting a DVD reader and a separate hard disk drive, for example, with a single computer interface rather than pairing devices with separate interfaces.

“There are other methods that can be used to do these things but using our method lowers manufacturers’ costs,” Werbicki says.

Having cut his teeth in Northern California’s Silicon Valley as a hardware engineer, Werbicki eventually became an executive with several companies there. By the time he founded Synchrome in 1996 in Northern California, he was quite familiar with the business and technical sides of the computer industry.

A 58-year-old native of Toronto, Werbicki moved his privately held company to a Spartan office complex in Las Vegas in 2006 to escape the high taxes that he said were rough on small businesses in California. He doesn’t have any employees. Instead, he has contracts with independent consultants, including Jorge Gustavson of Northern California and Faan-Hoan Liu of New Hampshire, the inventors of the technology that is now the basis of Werbicki’s many lawsuits.

Not long after the second of the two patents went into effect in 2001, Werbicki said he had an “inkling” that computer manufacturers had begun using the method devised by Gustavson and Liu. While still doing business under the Synchrome banner in California, Werbicki turned sleuth and began examining computers on sale at retail outlets. He disassembled them under laboratory conditions and proceeded to test his theory that the company’s method was being used without permission by the manufacturers.

The more he looked, the more convinced he became that the patented method had spread throughout the industry.

So he began filing federal lawsuits against its key players in 2006. While the prospect of taking on the IBMs and Sonys of the world might make most small businesses wilt, the big-name manufacturers did not intimidate Werbicki.

“In America we generally have a good legal system for a small patent holder,” he says.

Microsoft, which has not yet responded to the lawsuit, is accused of using the patents in its popular Xbox video game player. The company has sold more than 40 million second-generation Xboxes, known as Xbox 360. NEC, which also has yet to file its response, is alleged to have used the patented method for optical disc drives.

Other companies that have filed responses in the ongoing cases in Delaware and Georgia have flatly denied Synchrome’s allegations. Apple, which filed a counterclaim in the Delaware case, argued that Synchrome’s allegations weren’t specific enough. Last month, however, Apple and Synchrome reached a settlement, according to court records.

And gizmodo.com, a website that comments on gadgets and technology, calls Synchrome an “overly litigious company.”

Maybe — but Werbicki says at least some of the out-of-court agreements in the closed 2006 Texas case, which included Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sony, involved monetary settlements that favored his company.

“We’re pleased with the agreements and our relationship with all seven of those defendants,” he says, then smiles.

And he expects to have many more agreements and working relationships with many more companies in the coming years.