The Prior Art

Paul Allen v. The Internet

Former Microsoft executive and billionaire Paul Allen sued several major Internet companies and three large retailers for patent infringement today, asserting that four patents originating at Interval Research, Allen's dot-com era think tank, cover basic web browsing and e-commerce technologies.

The lawsuit [PDF] was filed by Interval Licensing LLC, a patent-holding company owned by Allen, and names eleven companies as defendants: AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.

Interval Research was founded in 1992. It closed its doors in 2000, but the lawsuit is necessary to monetize the investment that Allen made in the organization, said David Postman, a spokesman for Allen.

The patents cover "a variety of key processes in e-commerce," said Postman. "Interval Research was early—and right—on key pieces of the Internet," said Postman. "It's important now to protect that investment. We believe these companies are using that technology, in both e-commerce and search."

Allen is one of the world's richest people, with a fortune that Forbes magazine estimates as over $13 billion.

A Wired magazine profile of Interval Research suggests that by 1999, the institute was struggling, with Allen having spent upwards of $100 million on research and not much to show for it. "Interval always had a special buzz and a collection of talent that, even in the annals of technological genius, stands out."

The four patents-in-suit were filed between 1996 and 2000.

They are:

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

The suit was filed in the Western District of Washington. Interval Licensing is represented by Susman Godfrey, a Texas-based law firm that focuses on contingency-fee patent lawsuits, and Heim, Payne & Chorush is a smaller patent firm based in Houston.

More documents:

• Interval Licensing press release on the lawsuit
• Interval Licensing v. AOL et al. complaint [PDF]
• Coverage from Wall Street Journal

Cross-posted at Corporate Counsel.

 

 

Citing Possible Bias, ACLU Asks Rader to Recuse Himself in Myriad Case

With the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit set to consider a landmark case over the validity of human gene patents, attorneys for the plaintiffs in the suit are asking the court's chief judge to recuse himself from the matter—before the panel that will hear it has even been selected.

In a motion filed quietly in late June, Christopher Hansen of the American Civil Liberties Union and Daniel Ravicher claim that remarks made by Federal Circuit Chief Judge Randall Rader at a biotechnology industry event show he may have a biased view of the case in question, Association of Molecular Pathology et. al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office et. al, and should not be one of the three judges to decide the appeal.

Questioning Rader's objectivity is an unusual move that underscores just how high the stakes are in the case at issue, in which several doctors' groups have joined the ACLU and PubPat in seeking to invalidate patents on two genes related to breast cancer that are owned by Utah-based Myriad Genetics--and, more broadly, to challenge the legality of the thousands of genetic patents already in existence.

Law360 Calls Lawyer-Owned Shell Company a "Public Interest Group"

Our competitors are never afraid to call a spade... a public interest group.

Law360 seems to have a pretty flexible definition of that term. Last month, it included Americans for Fair Patent Use. Who is so concerned about such fairness? That would be F&B LLP, the Texas law firm that owns Americans for Fair Patent Use, which is a limited liability company set up to prosecute a false marking lawsuit filed in East Texas on July 14. The suit, against Apple, Sprint, Samsung, and Verizon, alleges that various smartphones made by those companies have false patent marks.

Did AFPU magically transform into a "public interest" group because  false marking is a qui tam action? Is it because the plaintiff has the word "fair" in it? Since the plaintiff's name actually ends with "LLC" we're at a loss as to how you spin this one.

Only Law360 used the term "public interest group" in its reporting. But—at the risk of sounding like we're tooting our own horns here—could one of the many web publications that obsess over lawsuits against Apple have bothered to correctly name the plaintiff here? Not only is the law firm clearly named in the corporate disclosure document [PDF] filed the same day as the complaint, but F&B actually fesses up to its ownership of AFPU on the fourth page of the complaint itself [PDF].

As we've discussed in an earlier column, a majority of false marking suits are being filed by lawyers themselves, along with a few serial plaintiffs.

Photo via Wikimedia / Snek01

Eben Moglen on Bilski, software patents, and big pharma

This interview is part of a series following the Supreme Court's Bilski decision, which left the laws on what you can get a patent on largely as they are, after a four-justice minority failed to ban "business method" patents.

Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen heads the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and wrote the group's amicus brief in Kappos v. Bilski. [PDF]

Moglen's position on the subject of software patents—that they should be banned—is, to say the least, outside the mainstream in legal circles. It has, however, garnered support among software developers and other techies, especially those who work in the world of open-source and free software.

Moglen's critique of the patent system extends well beyond the software issues he writes about, however. He suggests, for instance, that the 20-year monopoly granted by a patent is the product of a bygone era. And though he rejects the notion that he is "anti-patent," he says that the patent monopoly grant should be subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, not simply handed out at the "monopoly window" that he believes the current Patent and Trademark Office represents.

The Prior Art interviewed Moglen about his views on the Bilski decision, the future of software patents, and how patents affect innovation.

Q: What's your opinion of the Bilski decision?

The decision is one of those that clearly shows why it has come down on the last day of the term after being argued early. When you see a case like that come down, one of the things that occurs to you is that a majority has fallen apart. The justices agreed about less than they thought.