Paul Allen Sues Google, Apple and Others for Patent Infringement

September 1, 2010 - Last Friday Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed lawsuits against 11 major internet search and e-commerce companies alleging that they have infringed on four patents held by Interval Licensing, a company that he owns. The eleven defendants are AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube. Microsoft was not named.

Interval Licensing 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."

(source PR Newswire)

Here's a video of Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak defending Paul Allen's suit and patent trolls more generally - YouTube.