Read this PDF of Paul Allen and Interval Licensing L.L.C.’s patent infringement complaint against AOL, eBay, Apple, Google, Netflix, Facebook (Yeah, Microsoft vs. Allen), Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.
Interval and Allen’s four US Patents in this complaint here deal with the following aspects:
- Identify, process and alert items of “current interest” to users of online content; i.e. what you’ve seen before as “Users who bought this also bought:” and “Most bought overall” like sections.
- Displaying an attention message to the user unobtrusively; i.e. your smooth notification popups and/or bubble popups that display information. Also the way Mac’s Dashboard appears when activated (similar to Yahoo’s Widgets dashboard).
- Displaying items of related interest around a topic; i.e. Related news/pages, etc.
This case is going to be quite fun to follow, as it defines a large chunk of the “related” web (or social web, if you hang that way) we have today. It almost could tear Facebook down to nothingness if justice were dictatorial (No FOAF!).
If you ask me, this is the height of a patent, to hold rights to an idea and also its out-scope itself, not a particular implementation of it. We have a chance now, and we should take it and abolish such stupidness.
