Time was that Silicon Valley companies accused Microsoft of corporate treachery. Now Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has turned the tables, filing a marquee-quality lawsuit Friday that accuses Google, Apple, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, YouTube and Netflix of patent infringement.
Google, which the lawsuit suggests bit the hand that fed it, fired back with an accusation of its own.
“This lawsuit against some of America’s most innovative companies reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace,” the Mountain View search giant said in a statement. “Innovation — not litigation — is the way to bring to market the kinds of products and services that benefit millions of people around the world.”
The matter of who owns innovation is at the heart of the suit filed by Interval Licensing, a Seattle company owned and controlled by Allen that owns the patents that were awarded to Interval Research, a Palo Alto-based company founded by Allen and Xerox PARC veteran David Liddle in 1992.
Over nearly a decade, Interval Research employed 110 scientists who worked at the leading edge of personal computer and Internet technologies, winning about 300 patents. Many companies earn money through licensing patents that they own. The suit did not specify monetary damages Interval is seeking
The lawsuit involves four patents related to the fundamental ways that consumers experience websites.
One enables the navigation of audiovisual data, another enables users to quickly locate information related to a specific subject, and two others relate to how websites present images or information on user’s “peripheral attention.”
Facebook also issued a response: “We believe this suit is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously.” The social network was accused of infringing on one patent; some others are accused of multiple transgressions. EBay, meanwhile, also promised “a vigorous defense.”
Some of the defendants did not make an immediate response.
Interval’s lawsuit — which also names AOL, Office Depot, OfficeMax and Staples as defendants — represents a new venture for Allen, who resigned from Microsoft’s board in 2000 but remains a major stockholder. With a wealth estimated to exceed $13 billion, Allen is also widely known today as the owner of the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers sports franchises, and the bank roller of the Seattle’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, an unorthodox cultural venue. He also remains an active investor in technology.
Some of the patents cited in the lawsuit were awarded after Interval Research dissolved in 2000, with some of its employees reorganizing as Interval Media, which closed in 2006.
To underscore Interval’s significance in advancing Internet technologies, the lawsuit notes that the company collaborated with and provided funding for Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the research that resulted in Google. Offered as Exhibit 1 in the suit is ” a Google screen shot dated September 27, 1998 entitled ‘About Google!’ that identifies Interval Research in the ‘Credits’ section as one of two ‘Outside Collaborators’ and one of four sources of ‘Research Funding’ for Google.”
Brin and Page, the lawsuit further notes, acknowledged Interval’s funding in their 1998 research article entitled “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” in which they “present Google.”
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