Microsoft Corp co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen is suing nearly a dozen major companies, including tech giants Google Inc and Apple Inc, alleging they infringed on four Web technology patents held by his company Interval Licensing LLC.
Interval said on Friday it filed the suit in a US District Court in Seattle against the companies. In addition to Google and Apple, the defendants named in the suit are: Facebook Inc, eBay Inc, Yahoo Inc, Netflix Inc, AOL Inc, Office Depot Inc, OfficeMax Inc, Staples Inc and Google-owned YouTube LLC.
Interval owns patents from Interval Research, which was a technology research and development company that Allen started with David Liddle in the early 1990s.
Interval said that the patents it believes are being violated are key to how e-commerce and search companies work. The patents described in the suit refer to technology used for things such as Web browsing and sending alerts over the Web.
“This lawsuit is necessary to protect our investment in innovation,” Allen’s spokesman, David Postman, said in a statement.
Interval is seeking unspecified damages for the alleged infringements, and an order that the defendants either stop infringing on its patents or pay royalties for doing so.
Several companies named as defendants did not return requests for comment. Netflix, AOL, Yahoo and Office Depot had no comment.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes called the suit “completely without merit,” and eBay spokeswoman Johnna Hoff said the company is reviewing the suit.
Google said the suit “reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace.”
Gerry Elman, founder of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania-based Elman Technology Law PC, said the suit looks like one “that has to be taken seriously and not just blown away as a nonstarter.”
Still, the products and services offered by the companies named in the suit aren’t immediately threatened.
Patent cases can take months or years to resolve, and agreements over licensing and royalty payments often emerge.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained