At first sight, this extraordinary legal action against most of the digital world's leading lights might seem one of a kind:
Interval Licensing LLC ("Interval"), a Paul G. Allen company, filed a complaint today in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington against major internet search and e-commerce companies alleging that they have infringed on four patents held by Interval. The eleven defendants are AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.
On Open Enterprise blog.
It's not surprising that they do this. If I remember right, the company Intellectual Ventures made similarly ridiculous claims to innovation and fame.
ReplyDeleteAlso, this is only somewhat related, but Apple has filed a patent application to basically retaliate against the new laws permitting jailbreaking. It's some scary stuff, as they plan to monitor users' faces, voices, and even heartbeats. I wrote about it here: http://dasublogbyprashanth.blogspot.com/2010/08/apple-knows-your-heart-rate.html . Please do check it out and let me know what you think.
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a Linux Mint user since 2009 May 1
@PV: I think Intellectual Ventures is rather different - I've written about them quite a lot.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, Apple is worrying...
I'm not saying the two cases are the same, but didn't Intellectual Ventures also try to claim overly broad patents over (unrelated to Interval) fundamental software (among other things)?
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a Linux Mint user since 2009 May 1
@PV: I think they've tended to do licensing deals away from the limelight.
ReplyDeleteTouchay. (Is there a keyboard shortcut on Linux Mint to input an acute accent 'e'?)
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a Linux Mint user since 2009 May 1