I saw this story the other day, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to comment on it. It wasn’t until this morning, when I just saw how many companies were being included (some big ones, too) that I decided it might be time to look a little more deeply.
Here is the basic rundown:
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and mega man of the computing world, founded a business back in the early 90′s called Interval Research. Through this company he began filing tons of patents of inventions of himself and those who worked for his small company. However, few of them were utilized, and most are just copyrighted ideas, at this point.
Over the years, Allen claims that a number of Internet giants have started using as many as four of those patented ideas. Those being named in the lawsuit are AOL, Apple, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, Officemax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube. More or less 99% of the major ecommerce sites currently dominating the web.
Out of the 300 or so patents that Interval research has created and filed, four are allegedly being used. But this is hard to justify for many reasons. First, nothing was ever done with the patents. The entire point of the company was to use researchers to come up with ideas that might be profitable at some point in the future.
Second, Interval Research doesn’t really exist. A relic of Allen’s past life, it only sits there to act as a name for those patents. It has been years since anything was filed through them. This means that Allen could just be using it to hold the patents down.
Third, there is some word by sources close to the case that says that it is a general kind patent being used, and so each of the four is more like a concept than a direct invention. This will make it harder to claim the companies using them are stealing the invention, if that indeed does turn out to be true.
In the end, this doesn’t seem like a great idea on Allen’s part. Microsoft is not being named in connection to the lawsuit, which indicates he doesn’t have the corporate backing. So, he is filing the case based on his own small company, up against some of the highest earning guys in the business on a case that seems shaky, at best.
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Tough to take the article seriously when it doesn’t even get the guy’s name right…