We have seen many lawsuits that companies have filed to supposedly protect their intellectual property. A few days ago, Facebook filed suit against a company called TeachBook this week, claiming that having Book in the name is an infringement. It has been reported they are trying to trademark “Book” so they can own the rights to that name and stop anyone else from having it in their name. Talk about impacting your competition.
Now we have a lawsuit filed by Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, who is claiming that 11 companies violated patents that he owns. This comes from a company that he funded back in 1992 called Internal Research, which closed in 2000 where four patents were obtained. These are related to search, multimedia, databases and screen activity and were transferred to Interval Licensing when the company went out of business, which Paul Allen owns.
He is suing big names here, including, Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL. The giants in the industry and those with the deepest pockets. It is interesting that Microsoft is not on the list of those being sued. Could it be that he is not suing a company that he is a stockholder in? Anyway, the patents are very general in nature, which appears to be a common theme in these kinds of lawsuits, which makes it difficult to defend yourself from.
The patents are:
- U.S. Patent No. 6,263,507, for “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
- U.S. Patent No. 6,034,652, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
- U.S. Patent No. 6,788,314, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
- U.S. Patent No. 6,757,682, for “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”
As you can see by the titles, these are pretty general and just about every company is in violation of the patents if Paul Allen wins the lawsuit. The problem for the market is that these kinds of things stifle competition and ingenuity. Instead of being creative and putting out products that people can use, companies will first be looking at whether there are any patents out there that they might be in violation of and if not, hurry up and apply for a patent on the idea. The idea of building a better mouse trap is gone.
If Paul Allen had filed his lawsuit just a Facebook was gearing up, there would be no Facebook if he were to be successful. Is that what we really want?
In the end of all these kinds of lawsuits, the only ones that win are the lawyers.
