Patent Gadfly Drops Lawsuits Against Newspaper Web Sites

Patent gadfly Paul C. Heckel has dropped his lawsuits against many small U.S. newspapers that operate Web sites. Heckel claims to own the a U.S. patent for displaying an abstract of a story online with a link to the full story, a patent that pre-dates the invention of the Internet’s World Wide Web. Heckels told Editor & Publisher magazine that he might later reinstate his lawsuits.