Paul Allen Files Lawsuit against 11 Companies
The company owned by the co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, filed a lawsuit against Google, Apple and nine other companies on Friday.
According to Paul Allen, Google, Apple and nine other companies use patented inventions that are created by his research firm. He said that these companies are illegally using his inventions in their online navigation and viewing technology.
The lawsuit that Allen filed against the 11 companies includes 4 patents from the research done by Interval Research, a Silicon Valley research organization that is established in 1992 and shut down in the year 2000. The organization is funded by Allen and it is led by David E. Liddle, a former research scientist in the Xerox Palo Alto Research that is established in the 70’s. When the organization shut down in 2000, what remains on the organization is a licensing arm, which is filing the suit against the 11 companies.
The patents are issued from 2000 to 2004. It has appeared to be very useful in their application to web viewing and Internet commerce. According to the experts, the strength of the potent claims is still not clear as of now. They said that the patents are developed by a firm that invested on the research and not a patent-buying and licensing firm.
According to Josh Lerner, an intellectual property expert at the Harvard Business School, the United States Patent and Trademark Office will have a hard time deciding on this issue because of the date when these patents were granted. He said that the patents were approved during the time that the patent office was inundated with process patents and business method. He said that these kinds of patents on ideas are not new even if they are not patented previously.
