Microsoft Co-Founder Sues Apple and Ten Other Companies

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is suing eleven Internet companies including Apple for violating patents on "fundamental web technologies" developed by Interval Research, the company that he created with Xerox PARC veteran David Liddle in the 1990s.

TechFlash notes that Microsoft and Amazon are missing from the list; however, Allen's spokesman David Postman says "this is the most recent step in a long process but it is not necessarily the end of the process."

The full list of defendants are AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.


The suit alleges that the companies violate a patent for a “Browser for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audiovisual data” (USPTO 6,263,507); two patents for an “Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device” (USPTO 6,034,652 and 6,788,314) and one for "Alerting users to items of current interest.” (USPTO 6,757,682).

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