Paul Allen Sues Apple, Others Over Patents

<i>"We recognize that innovation has a value, and patents are the way to protect that."</i><p>Innovation has no value to the public if you don't produce and ship a good product. In my opinion the company that actually ships something should always have the upper hand because it's good for consumers. Patent reform should follow a use-it-or-lose-it model. If a company comes up with an innovative idea, ships a product, and that product stays on the market (in one form or another) for many years they probably deserve to own the patent. If people are buying it then it must be halfway decent. If they never produce a shipping product they shouldn't be able to hold the patent hostage. If they decide to stop selling a product that uses the patent someone else should have the opportunity to dust it off.

That's got to be the mother of all patent lawsuits to date.<p>I hope that it will now become clear to the world at large that a patent without any intention to produce a product is simply a waste of time and money. I'd much prefer it if all these patent filing clowns would keep their 'research' locked up in their vaults and called them trade secrets, that would give nobodies like me a chance at just getting on with our jobs without stepping on someones patented toes.

This is the problem with Patent troll "portfolio companies" like his: It doesn't make anything, so there can never be a countersuit with protective patents.<p>So, even if we had IBM step in with its portfolio of 30,000 patents (and growing by 5000 each year) and snarl up the entire industry to prove a point, Allen would be like "whatever" and soldier on, because he makes nothing.

Sad to see him become a Patent troll.<p>Also, what could be the point of such a lawsuit? Surely Paul Allen cannot think that he can have out-of-court settlements (no cross-licensing since his company does not produce anything) with all the listed companies. Some of them will surely fight back.

It's really odd that Paul Allen is doing this, he certainly doesn't need the money or the hassle. Is it possible that he's suing these high profile companies to spark some kind of legislative reform re: software patents?

Some background info from a /. comment: <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1768970&#38;cid=33401104" rel="nofollow">http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1768970&#38;cid=3340...</a><p><i>This is amusing. Here's some history on the company. Interval Research was an R&#38;D outfit that Paul Allen founded back in the 1990's. You've never heard of it, because they were incredibly secretive. So hush-hush that when they went belly-up no one outside of the company knew about it. Literally. It took months before the Press finally got wind of it.<p>The place was a great place to be if you were doing research. Literally "let a thousand roses bloom". Unfortunately, they were horribly mismanaged. Allen blew hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly over budget, before he finally realized that he wasn't getting anything out it. They wanted to be the next version of SRI. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out.<p>Top management was, at best, incompetent. At worse, downright crooks. They hired some people on certain terms, and then shortly afterwards said "Opps - we really meant to hire you at a lower level". Truly a boneheaded move. Fortunately it didn't happen to me, but the look on people's faces when they found out was unforgettable.<p>Interval did some really amazing stuff; years ahead of its time. But they could never get the products out to market (though they tried), mostly due to amazing incompetence on the part of the lead engineers. You know the type. Big egos and no talent. Perhaps there was an exception to that rule, but I don't recall it.<p>I'm not surprised that Paul Allen has turned into a Patent Troll; it will be the only way he can get his money back. The only thing surprising is that it took him so long. But he never impressed me as being the sharpest knife in the drawer. As for other history, they had a number of big names there, from many fields. In tech, you may have heard of Lee Felsenstein if you're familiar with history. Their office was in the Research area of Palo Alto. Near Stanford, down the street from the Wall Street Journal, between Page Mill and Hillview<p>Despite that unfortunate ending, I still look back fondly on Interval. They paid well, too. I made lots of money off of Paul Allen. Thanks, Paul!</i>

So he's suing Apple, Google, AOL, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.

I'll burn a hundred points but somebody has to say it:<p>HEY PAUL ALLEN, GO FUCK YOURSELF!

It would be really cool if mainstream media would link to the patents the article talks about because their description is horrible.

I hope such lawsuits bring an end to software patents.

Could this be the commencement of the long feared software patent Mutually Assured Destruction?

Who cares? It sounds big and scary and really bad... especially to us start-up types but I'd bet that there is nothing that hasn't been patented or could be deemed to be covered by a patent that's been put out on the web.<p>Seriously, start looking through the patents filed on Google (I started with one of these Paul Allen ones, then moved on to others filed by others but which were cited) and came to the conclusion that this is all ridiculous.<p>Here we see that Apple could possibly sue anyone for invoking the "mouseover" or "hover" events: <a href="http://www.google.com/patents?id=mPYiAAAAEBAJ&#38;printsec=abstract&#38;zoom=4&#38;source=gbs_overview_r&#38;cad=0#v=onepage&#38;q&#38;f=false" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents?id=mPYiAAAAEBAJ&#38;printsec=a...</a><p>While I wholeheartedly agree with protecting IP, to me that is more of a copyright issue (not ripping off code) rather than ideas.<p>Ultimately what it means for us is: Go forth and code. Create whatever you want and ignore the patents out there. If you are successful, and a patent troll sues you, you can come to an agreement (license or otherwise). Really, no worries here.

You know what I think we should do? Institute a law where you can't sue a company for patent infringement unless you do so before they introduce and make a substantial amount of money off that product. Say, 1 million in revenue or something.

Some seem rather obvious:<p>"The technology behind one patent allows a site to offer suggestions to consumers for items related to what they're currently viewing, or related to online activities of others in the case of social networking sites.<p>A second, among other things, allow readers of a news story to quickly locate stories related to a particular subject. Two others enable ads, stock quotes, news updates or video images to flash on a computer screen, peripherally to a user's main activity."

Another interesting way to look at it, if he did win big in this case then gave it all to worthy causes it could be a net win for society.<p>Hopefully it draws attention to software patents flaws. If government were hesitant to move away from them altogether maybe they could try a 2 year trail of no new patents or something.

&#62; Paul Allen says he owns the technology behind all these ideas<p>It's hard to imagine Allen owning any technology Google or Apple are using...

He should have sued Oracle too.

Octopus ain't free, you know.

someone should patent being a litigious prick

Aristocracy is completely out of touch. Good news in a way.

Maybe it's performance art?

Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold (former-Msft CTO) must be two peas in a pod:<a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml</a>

my estimation of Mr. Allen has just plummeted

point of evidence 5,436 that US software patents are a joke and need to be destroyed.

If Larry can, why Paul cannot? ^_^

"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," a Google spokesman said.<p>I nearly choked. Are you shitting me? Marketplace doesn't allow you to "steal" others technologies. How would they feel about others infringing their search engine patents. Before anyone go wild on me, let me make it clear I am not supporting Mr. Allen or software patents or even know if there is a patent infringement here. All I am saying is if there is an infringement, I don't get this Googler.