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Litigation season hots up – Paul Allen sues almost everyone over patent violations
28 August 2010 , Written by Dhruv Tanwar
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Apparently, the world's largest software giants have a hobby to keep them gainfully occupied during a downturn, or whenever the have more time at hand than to work with - its called patent litigation.

Close on the heels of a legal spat between Oracle and Google over alleged patent infringement, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen added the latest batch of fuel to the patent-litigation fire, suing no less than eleven companies for violating four patents.

PaulAllenThe latest volley on the patent – litigation battleground comes straight off the hip of Interval Licensing LLC, a Paul G. Allen company, which has targeted eleven companies in a complaint filed in the US District Court of the Western District of Washington. The companies are major Internet search and e-commerce entities, who Interval Licensing alleges have infringed on four of its patents.  

The eleven defendants are AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.

In a statement, the plaintiff said it holds patents of Interval Research, the former company founded by Allen and David Liddle in 1992 to perform advanced research and development in the areas of information systems, communications, and computer science.  The patents in the lawsuit cover fundamental web technologies first developed at Interval Research in the 1990s, which the company believes are being infringed by major e-commerce and web search companies.

The patents Interval is asserting include:

  • United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled "Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data."
  • United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."
  • United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled "Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device."  
  • United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled "Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest."  


David Postman, spokesman for Paul Allen said, "This lawsuit is necessary to protect our investment in innovation. We are not asserting patents that other companies have filed, nor are we buying patents originally assigned to someone else. These are patents developed by and for Interval."

Interval Research was founded by Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, and Liddle, who developed fundamental technologies in the 1970s when he worked at Xerox PARC. Interval, the statement said, was a preeminent technology firm, employing over 110 scientists, physicists and engineers. The firm also helped fund outside projects, including Sergey Brin's and Lawrence Page's research that over the years has shaped into what the world knows as Google.

Image: courtesy Vulcan.com
 

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