several television news programs (e.g. CNN Headline News, NBC Nightly News), as well as from text news sources (e.g., news wire services, traditional print media such as newspapers and magazines, and online news services such as Clarinet).” There’s mention of an idea for speeding up a video broadcast to facilitate skimming, and of automatically identifying and juxtaposing related news stories from different sources.
The suit says that AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube are infringing on the Interval patent “by making and using websites, hardware, and software to categorize, compare, and display segments of a body of information as claimed in the patent.”
Patents No. 6,034,652 and 6,788,314: “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.” Issued March 7, 2000, and September 7, 2004, respectively.
These patents are for software that places information from various content providers in unused areas of a computer display at scheduled intervals, or after a set idle period. The idea is similar to PointCast’s “push media” PC screen saver from the late 1990s. In fact, the patent’s “Related Art” section references screen savers and wallpaper, claiming that they “have not heretofore been used as a means to convey information from information providers to computer users” or to “enable retrieval of display content from a remote location via a computer network.” (The earlier of these two patents was evidently filed before PointCast’s release.)
The suit says that AOL, Apple, Google, and Yahoo are infringing on these two patents “by making, using, offering, providing, and encouraging customers to use products that display information in a way that occupies the peripheral attention of the user as claimed in the patent.”
Patent No. 6,757,682: “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.” Issued June 29, 2004.
The most concise and detailed of the Interval patents at issue, this one describes a system that sends real-time alerts to Internet users whenever it finds items on the Web that relate to their previously expressed interests.
The Interval complaint alleges that all 11 of the defendants are infringing the patent “by making and using websites and associated hardware and software to provide alerts that information is of current interest to a user as claimed in the patent.”
Broadly speaking, the four patents would seem to cover features that are almost ubiquitous on the Web today, from RSS news readers to personalized news and e-commerce sites. But with the exception of the final patent, which seems to prefigure Google Alerts pretty accurately, it’s hard to see any obvious one-to-one correspondence between the ideas in the patents and specific products or services from AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, or YouTube.
Presumably, Allen’s lawyers at Seattle’s Susman Godfrey wouldn’t have picked the 11 defendants named in the complaint if they didn’t have examples in mind of specific products or websites that infringe on each of the patents. But that’s precisely the information that won’t be shared until later in the suit, according to Postman.
Given the breadth of several of the patents, and the apparent ubiquity of the ideas they describe, I asked Postman whether Interval and its legal team are contending that the defendants’ alleged infringement was deliberate, or whether it could have been accidental.
“We will be able to show that the companies should have known that they were infringing on the patents,” he responded. “Some of these processes have clearly become key to the Internet in e-commerce and search, and they are used by people every day. Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean the technology is in the public domain.”
Responses to the suit in the blogosphere have ranged from uncomprehending to viciously negative, with some critics comparing Allen to the “patent trolls” who buy up intellectual property merely in order to file infringement suits. Dean Takahashi, writing for VentureBeat, called the suit “thinly veiled highway robbery.”
But in a press release announcing the filing of the complaint on Friday, Interval argued that the lawsuit is necessary to protect its “investment in innovation.” The organization emphasized that the patents at issue were developed “by and for Interval,” not purchased from other companies.
“Interval was founded to create cutting-edge technology,” Postman underscored to me. “This was really Paul’s effort to create a Xerox PARC-type operation for the Internet age. And they were early and right on a lot of key pieces of the Internet—what Paul has always referred to as the ‘wired world.’ Some of those patents ended up going to market as products, others were licensed off, and now this is the step we are at in the process.”
“Paul invested heavily in innovation back in the late 1990s, and now we are moving to protect that investment in innovation,” Postman says. “At its root, that is what this is about.”
