Not surprisingly, Allen isn’t suing Microsoft.
According to the Wall Street Journal;
“The suit lists violations of four patents for technology that appear to be key components of the operations of the companies—and that of e-commerce and Internet search companies in general. 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.
A second patent, among other things, allows readers of a news story to quickly locate articles 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.”
We’ve had a lot of frivolous lawsuits recently from unknown companies claiming they own patents that huge companies are infringing on, but a lawsuit from Paul Allen is a whole different matter entirely. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
