Exec fights to save Web patent: Belcan's Anderson stands to gain millions.(Ralph Anderson, CEO of Belcan Corp.)(Statistical Data Included)

Local entrepreneur Ralph Anderson could make millions of dollars from a patent lawsuit involving the giants of the Internet.

The suit could ultimately decide who owns rights to one of the basic processes that governs the transfer of images and text on the World Wide Web.

Anderson, CEO of Blue Ash-based engineering and staffing company Belcan Corp., is a minority partner in an Indiana company awaiting a patent ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.

That ruling, expected to be issued by spring, could bring the 78-year-Old Anderson and his partner tens of millions of dollars in damages --and perhaps much more annually in royalties.

The case concerns technology at the heart, of conducting business on the Web. In 1992, Indianapolis entrepreneur Charles Hill filed a patent application with the government seeking to put his name on an electronic can loging process that helped lay the groundwork for the Web explosion in the mid-1990s.

That patent, which was eventually issued in 1996 combines text and pictures in a way that significantly reduces the bandwidth needed to download web pages. The patent covers the division of a Web page into constant and variable data.

The constant data, usually memory-intensive picture files, are stored on a user's computer so that they can be accessed more quickly when the page is updated. The variable data is usually text or data stored on a remote server.