Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld) [LWN.net]

Computerworld reports that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's suit against Google and ten other technology companies is on again, after Interval Licensing (owned by Allen) revised its complaint in response to the December 28 deadline imposed by a judge who dismissed the original complaint. The revision lists spectacular innovations such as: "Patent 6,034,652, dubbed 'Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device,' spells out a way to notify users of additional information. [...] 'Devices containing the Android Operating System and associated software infringe by displaying information including, e.g., text messages, Google Voice messages, chat messages, and calendar events, to a user of a mobile device in an unobtrusive manner,' claimed the lawsuit."

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Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 29, 2010 22:40 UTC (Wed) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (7 responses)

I suppose if one were to read this on an Android phone, that would be ok, since it would hardly be in an unobtrusive manner.

I really don't understand this lawsuit. Is Paul Allen running out of money for new toys? Does he want an even bigger yacht? Last I heard, his yacht was 100 feet longer than Larry Ellison's, so maybe he's got some sooper sekrit information that Larry is about to buy up that British aircraft carrier.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 13:38 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (6 responses)

He is trying recoup expenses on a failed business model.

He tried to do a business were he just hired a bunch of super intelligent people to sit down and design the future of technology. Then after they figured everything out they would patent everything and use those patents to lead humanity into a bright new era they envisioned.

Like a sort of modern day Illuminati built on intellectual property laws.

Of course they utterly failed to predict anything of value and since they produced no products or services that people actually wanted then even if they had a decent idea they generated no profit.

Meanwhile corporations and individuals that put effort into actually creating products and services that people wanted actually ended up being the ones that created the future of computing. Thusly the ones that did a good job and anticipated the market correctly reaped their rewards.

Paul Allan, like the other fools that believe they have a right to control other people's activities because they are the first ones to present a idea to the USA government along with a application and a few thousand dollars felt wronged about the turn of events. Even though he has long since stopped contributing anything of value to anybody they still feel they have the "right" to own certain ideas.

Now he is just flinging his patent portfolio around and hoping to find some that stick.

He has turned himself into a patent troll. He is trying to use the USA government to force the people that actually due the work, production, and innovation into handing over their profits to him.

The whole affair just highlights how broken the idea of intellectual property is.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 15:15 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (4 responses)

"The whole affair just highlights how broken the idea of intellectual property is. "

I think the Wright Brothers did that 100 years ago. They certainly put a lot of work into their designs, but while everybody else was comparing notes and flying in public, they almost went into hiding, refusing even to demonstrate what they could do without a deposit on an order. They patented bending the wings to control flight ("wing warping") and Glenn Curtis came up with ailerons, separate pieces of wings which were hinged, to beat the patent, so the Wright Brothers sued. While everybody else was forging ahead, including Curtis, the Wrights stayed in lawsuit mode and fell so far behind that they contributed almost nothing beyond the first flights to aviation history. Eventually the US entered WW I and either bought up their patents or knocked their heads together, because they wanted to buy planes without patent encumbrance.

The Wrights got their page in history, but lost just about everything else. A clearer comparison of sitting on your intellectual property butt vs continuing practical innovation is hard to come up with.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 16:21 UTC (Thu) by Yorick (guest, #19241) [Link]

Indeed, and it also serves as a good argument against overly broad international "intellectual property" treaties: The development of flight technology continued rapidly elsewhere, unhindered by those patents. In some respects, the Americans did not catch up until World War 2.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 17:20 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Go back a couple more years, and the early development of the steam engine suffered EXACTLY the same way.

The first steam engines were low-pressure affairs, and while high-pressure engines were quickly available as one-off experimentals, they weren't made in any numbers due to patent harassment. Once the patents expired, they swept the low-pressure engines aside almost immediately.

Cheers,
Wol

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 31, 2010 11:16 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

At least, however, the patent system served its purpose of making sure the new invention was publicly disclosed. Without it, the inventors of high-pressure engines might have been able to keep their idea secret and it would have taken even longer for them to become widespread.

The interesting question is whether any of the 'inventions' patented by Paul Allen's company and others are truly advancements which will benefit everyone by being publicly disclosed. I suspect not, at least not in the field of software.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 31, 2010 18:09 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Curtis was the first to describe ailerons to the US patent office. He was not the first to think of, patent or implement them.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Jan 7, 2011 22:54 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Paul Allen, like the other fools that believe they have a right to control other people's activities because they are the first ones to present a idea to the USA government along with a application and a few thousand dollars felt wronged about the turn of events.

You're selling Allen short on his belief that he has the right to control other people's activities. By your description of what Allen did, his consideration was significantly more than getting an application to the US patent office first and paying an application fee. He also hired a bunch of super intelligent people, which presumably cost him a lot of money. Spending a lot of money can easily be justification for controlling other people's activities.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 29, 2010 23:30 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> The revision lists spectacular innovations such as: "Patent 6,034,652, dubbed 'Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device,'

Hey, it's a language innovation, for sure :-)

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 0:54 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (5 responses)

Emacs had an unobtrusive way of notifying you that you had email back in the late '80s. The word "mail" would appear on the right side of the status line.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 5:37 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (4 responses)

Emacs had an unobtrusive way of notifying you that you had email back in the late '80s.

The xbiff app (displays a mailbox icon that changes when mail arrives) in X11 is probably almost as old.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 6:19 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (3 responses)

Neither of which are prior art for the actual specific claims in the patent.

Patents and prior art don't work the way most people think they do.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 9:51 UTC (Thu) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (2 responses)

So how do they work then?

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Dec 30, 2010 13:43 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

You ignore what is said in the abstract. The abstract just sorts of set the stage. Like the FAT patent abstract said that it was a way that you could store store filenames longer then 8.3 on FAT yet retain backwards compatibility. Sure there are lots of things that did that, but that is not what the patent is about. What the patent is about is in the claims.

You have to go and look at the claims and match up all the items in the primary claim with prior art. If something like emacs did everything that was described in the main claims then you can have a case of prior art. If it only covers some of the claims or only does what is described in the abstract then you don't have a case.

You can zap one claim at a time

Posted Dec 30, 2010 14:08 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Woah, now you're going too far the other way.

Yes, it's not prior art if you have something that merely sounds like the patented invention.

But it IS prior art if you can show that somebody already did ANY of the individual claims. Unless they did ALL of the claims it doesn't invalidate the entire patent, but it can weaken it considerably by reducing it to the most specific and thus least valuable claims.

If you show that in fact the patent examiner didn't notice somebody already invented say claims 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 because this thing here did them in 1983, then you get down to arguing whether in fact your product even infringes the remaining claims, and if so whether any of them is non-obvious in the face of the now-revealed prior art. For once patent law is on your side - you needn't show the inventors were aware of this prior art, they are magically assumed to know about it and their invention can be ruled "obvious" in the light of things they never heard of.

Moreover (for Apple at least who just want the troll to go away), the patent troll may begin to worry what else you will dig up and decide they don't want this lawsuit after all. In civil litigation persuading the opponent that he's not likely to win is almost as good as beating him.

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:27 UTC (Fri) by Magdalena (guest, #72626) [Link] (8 responses)

Hey Paul,
Green Dot is a scientific research and development company registered in State of Washington. Company uses e-commerce technology based on indicated your 4 patents and 20 years of researches. Please let me know if you are going to sue companies located in State of Washington or what?

Magdalena dbs Green Dot/Mark Veber

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 8, 2011 19:07 UTC (Tue) by Magdalena (guest, #72626) [Link] (7 responses)

UUU- I am scared, Mark Veber

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 9, 2011 17:16 UTC (Wed) by Magdalena (guest, #72626) [Link] (6 responses)

UUU-me too, Magdalena

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 11, 2011 22:46 UTC (Fri) by Magdalena (guest, #72626) [Link] (5 responses)

Hey, Magdalena seems like Mr. Allen works to develop software called
"Aristotelian Logic" probable after this we are going to have software "Socrates' Paradox". I think it was Socrates' statement that "One thing I know is that I know nothing". What do you think Mag ???

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 12, 2011 17:55 UTC (Sat) by Magolena (guest, #72876) [Link] (4 responses)

Hey Mark, thanks for this chat, sometimes it's difficult to find you, seems like you are lost in digital world. Seriously, I think that I know more about the Achilles and the tortoise paradox and maybe about the arrow paradox too? So far KMK. Magdalena

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 13, 2011 2:21 UTC (Sun) by Magolena (guest, #72876) [Link] (3 responses)

Excuse me for interruption, but what means KMK. Andrew.

Dear Andrew,
KMK means kiss my ka-ka. Sorry if you were not able to understand me. Magdalena

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 13, 2011 3:02 UTC (Sun) by Magolena (guest, #72876) [Link] (2 responses)

To Jake,

I've just received your comment via e-mail.
Sorry for my comments. I thought that this is Facebook. Seems like looks the same. Really sorry.

Mark

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 19, 2011 12:25 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

This is the most surreal comment thread I have ever read on LWN. Was this two or even three people sharing a guest account, operating under the bizarre misapprehension that LWN was Facebook, and conversing only with each other?

Paul Allen revises patent suit, targets Android, Apple iTunes (Computerworld)

Posted Feb 21, 2011 9:51 UTC (Mon) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

It must be an anti-Aaron Barr/HBGary Federal social networking application, you spew your chit-chat across 1000's of random sites, and rely on low signal to noise ratio