Paul Allen has never been mad before, but his latest legal action, totally out of character for the billionaire who was once one of the founding members of Microsoft, tries to say that he owns core aspects of the internet and ecommerce, and it shows that on this occasion he is. Mad that is. And by that we mean insane, not angry.
He is taking on companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and eBay saying that they are violating patents which came out of his defunct investment company Interval Research. He is laying claim to the idea of pop-up stock quotes on a website, recommendations for related reading near a news article, videos along the side of any screen and basic ecommerce.
There are an additional 8 companies named in the legal action including AOL, Apple, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.
If he really could patent such obvious inventions and manage to convince the world that they were not obvious and that there was no prior art, then the sky would be the limit, but our thoughts are that we had heard these ideas at least 20 years ago ourselves and surely he should be going after Amazon first and foremost, if he wanted to be patent troll on the subject of recommendation engines.
It would be like saying that you hold a patent for search engine technology and trying to annex Google’s revenue. Or for hypertext and taking on the entire internet. Of course many search engine ideas were original at Google, but the bulk of them sprouted from the early days of Fortran and Algol programming and many have become embedded in modern compiler code libraries, but date back 40 years or so. The same is true of the activity of the early internet. It’s legacy is immensely complicated.
The patents in question include Patent No. 6,263,507, which seems to be about a specialized Browser application for viewing similar news items to the one you are watching on TV; another two refer to something called an Attention Manager, and this could be interpreted as any new information which retains a readers attention, like a moving strip of news headlines or stock prices; while the final patent is about bringing to an internet users’ attention the fact that there is other stuff available that he might want to read ‘ so perhaps a recommendation engine or technology like Autonomy, which finds related articles across the internet.
It’s a shame that Allen feels the need to try to recoup old rehashed patent ideas just because he poured so much money into Interval Research without getting a payback (around $100 million we understand).
Interval Research was founded by Allen and David Liddle, a former Xerox PARC researcher from the 1970s. Interval also helped fund outside projects, thought to include some of the Sergey Brin research which resulted in the creation of Google. So if Interval gets any mileage out of these four patents, it may conveniently come across some more. There are hundred of patents filed in the US Patent and Trade Mark Office either which are filed by Interval Research or which refer to prior art which is known to belong to Interval, so this may be the start of an entire campaign about these technologies.
This case has the look of a kind of modern Myth of Sisyphus, the Greek god condemned forever to repeat the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again and any legal outcomes will likely perish in the same way, as they would result in a tax on the internet and be immediately appealed, on and on into the future.
So we reckon the outcome is bound to be inconclusive and any court decision is likely to be challenged and appealed, especially as the companies he has targeted can afford to tie him up for years and years to come, and the discovery process will have to track down 100,000s of uses or these and related technologies across millions of web sites.