It was 1987 when grad student Alan Emtage started hunting the Internet for software that could be of use to his employer, McGill University's school of computer science.

The World Wide Web didn't exist, but the Internet -- a network of, at that point, a million or so computer servers, most affiliated with universities or the U.S. government -- had a surprising amount of software available in the public domain.

To expedite the hunt, Emtage wrote a program that automatically searched for key words appearing in archives coded in File Transfer Protocol (FTP, the language created to send Net files). After "crawling" through FTP sites, the program created an index of those containing the key words, giving Emtage a usable list of likely sources.

Emtage's boss told other engineers about the "search engine," and ultimately the pair wrote a separate program allowing others to use it.

In 1989 Emtage released the program, calling it Archie (for "archive" without the v). In 1990 he put out a second version. In 1992 he co-founded a company, Bunyip Information Systems, to collect license fees (mainly from universities) for using Archie. At its peak in 1995, more than 30 Archie servers around the world searched and cataloged millions of FTP files.

All this explains why it got Emtage's goat when he read recent comments of David Wetherell, the CEO of Andover, Mass., Internet holding company CMGI, which is the majority owner of the California search company AltaVista.

In an interview with Internet World, Wetherell said that, to generate revenue for struggling AltaVista, the company would move aggressively to charge license fees to those using search technology on which it holds 38 patents.

Whom would AltaVista charge? Pretty much any entity with search capability at its site, even if its engine hunts only internal corporate intranets. "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents," Wetherell said.

Asked if AltaVista would sue to protect its purported ownership, Wetherell said, "If necessary, we will defend it, to the letter of the law."

All that was too much for Emtage. The 36-year-old, who never filed a patent application of his own, is enough of an idealist about the Net's communicative possibilities to be saddened by its transformation into a wild Web increasingly dominated by multinational corporations and crass commercialism.

So Emtage took a look at AltaVista's patents, which were filed after the company's creation in 1995. And while AltaVista claims to have created the first technology to crawl World Wide Web files, that technology, in Emtage's view, is substantially similar to Archie -- and, even more obviously, to Veronica, a search engine created in 1991 by a University of Minnesota researcher that hunted through files with embedded links. (FTP files have no embedded data.)

"Though I'm not a lawyer, the patents being 'defended' by CMGI and AltaVista include basic concepts that were incorporated into Archie years before the World Wide Web even existed," said Emtage. "The Internet has been around since 1969. It didn't spring from the head of Zeus in 1995."

Emtage should know, since he sat on a task force in the mid-1990s with MIT professor Tim Berners-Lee when Berners-Lee was creating the Web. (The Web is a system of servers designed to handle data written in HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, the successor to FTP that allows for links and embedded data).

Now chief technical officer of a New York City Web engineering company called Mediapolis Inc., Emtage said he'll help anyone contacted by AltaVista or CMGI lawyers about possible patent infringement. He says several companies have already been in touch with him.

Emtage's help could prove decisive. Gary Smith, an intellectual property lawyer for the Boston firm Burns & Levinson, said that if anyone can demonstrate that a substantially similar technology existed and was publicly disclosed before a patent application was filed, that's enough to invalidate the patent. (Smith has not reviewed AltaVista's patents and wouldn't comment on the specific case.)

AltaVista and CMGI spokespeople did not respond today to interview requests.

Intellectual property suits involving online technologies are becoming more common. Many technologists and attorneys have criticized the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for granting a large number of patents for technologies obvious in other contexts but that have never been applied online.

Famously, Amazon.com successfully prevented barnesandnoble.com from using its patented "one-click" purchasing method. (barnesandnoble buyers now must click twice.) Last month British Telecom sued Net service provider Prodigy, claiming violations of its patent for linking data. And Interactive Gift Express has sued to protect a patent covering the purchase of downloadable data, such as music or video files.

Smith of Burns & Levinson said, "This kind of case is no longer surprising, and you'll be seeing an increasing number of them as companies increasingly look at their patent resources as sources of revenue."

Emtage said, "I have no problem with the concept of intellectual property. But I draw the line at 'predatory patenting,' when companies throw anything at the wall and see what sticks. The PTO has abrogated its responsibility by adopting a strategy of 'Approve them all and let the courts decide.' And companies with deep pockets can afford to bully others with the threat of lawsuits, since it's often cheaper for competitors to pay royalties than to litigate."

The engineer said he expects no monetary gain from his activities. "My point is to put up a flag that (AltaVista) can see before they start throwing their weight around....If I can be of assistance, give me a call."