If I wanted to show that my technology wasn't "super freaky out there" (which he could easily be accused of by people who don't slurp up Google press releases every day), what better way than to show that it looks almost identical to something that the all-trusted Google is going to be selling in the near future?

It is possible I'm not cynical enough, but if I were trying to gain sympathy for my cyborg-prosthetic plight, the more I could relate it to things people are already comfortable with, the better.

I think the simplest answer is the most likely: That franchise has bumped prices up above what McD's corp allows for and/or has figured out a way to game the computers so they are underreporting their revenue and thus are paying much less in franchise fees than they should be. Given its prime tourism spot, people don't complain, but if pictures got back to corporate, there would be problems.

My thoughts exactly, though my sentiment is that Steve Mann deserves some thought from Glass engineers.

I've been following his work for some years (decades) now, and while he is an "interesting" person, he has made many leaps in both design and tech involved, as well as testing.

Absolutely, the guy is a frickin' genius!

All I know is we have three things:

1) A patent for the 'eyetrap' issued in 2003 with another 8 years or so to run.

2) A huge company with > $100B in the bank who has made a big publicity play betting on their technology that, on the surface clearly infringes.

3) No statements either from either party that a license is in place. In fact the Google Glass page should say "this device is covered by patents ..." but it doesn't.

If in fact no license exists, I see a table in the square with between 100M$ and a 1B$ sitting on it with nobody watching. I would not be surprised in the least that someone decided to try and take it off the table.

Time will tell.

>A huge company with > $100B in the bank

Google doesn't have > $100B in the bank (citation: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=goog+Balance+Sheet). You are probably thinking of Apple.

Your right they have been spending big chunks of late (I believe the Motorola deal recently closed so that 12B check had to clear the bank eventually).

I continue to believe that Google is perceived to be a 'high value' target by offensive litigators.

The technology used in eyetrap and Google's glasses is sufficiently different that I doubt the eyetrap patent is really being infringed by Google. I doubt Steve has the money or desire to take Google to court anyway, and probably holds the patent as a defensive measure against himself being sued by someone like Google.

Sort of FYI, plaintiff lawyers in the US may choose to work on a contingency basis if they think there is a big payoff at the end, no cost to the plaintiff, just let them sue on your behalf and they are off to the races.

I don't know about you, but that seems a good deal more implausible than a restaurant being run by a mob.

And other stuff that raises flags for me.

First the original article was deep-linked into the eyetap.org site. Which is to say it didn't appear as a link on the front page, in fact I didn't find any inlinks to it until this story broke and those are from blogs etc. And it was posted by an account created to post that one link on HN (not like Dr. Mann or someone who regularly participates here stumbled across it and tried to link it.)

Now if Dr. Mann had a running blog about life as a cyborg or his thoughts on wearable computing, and this just happened to come up in that blog as "Oh the saddest thing happened ..." then it might feel more natural. It has since been converted to a one-entry wordpress blog.

As I've said elsewhere, we'll see what the next steps are. Eyetap has certainly gotten a lot of publicity out of the deal so I expect the press will follow up on any fallout here as well.

The resemblance between Google Glass and his "Glass" is striking, but the use of the comparative picture and the emphasis on the similarity of the name is at odds with the main thrust of article describing the alleged assault, suggesting an ulterior motive.

A patent suit is always going to break out these days, in anything even remotely connected with mobile computing, so the correlation there isn't very strong.

[edit] The current pace of litigation seems to be leading towards some form of Kessler Syndrome - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome - but made of patents instead of orbital debris, that will finally result in all courtrooms in the world discussing nothing but technical IP cases.