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“Mr. Allen, 57, Friday through his firm Interval Licensing LLC filed suit in federal court in Seattle asserting the companies are using technology from his laboratory,” Searcey reports. “Named in the suit, along with Apple and Google, are AOL Inc., eBay Inc., Facebook Inc., Netflix Inc., Office Depot Inc., OfficeMax Inc., Staples Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Google’s YouTube subsidiary.”
“The suit doesn’t name Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. or other technology firms in Seattle where Mr. Allen is based,” Searcey reports. “The suit doesn’t estimate a damage amount.”
Searcey reports, “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.”
Full article here.
The compliant alleging patent infringement is here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hypocrite. After the “Grand Theft GUI,” among many others, that Microsoft pulled on Apple, Allen ought to let Apple “borrow” from him (if they even did) ad infinitum.
Allen and Gates ought to be on their knees thanking Steve Jobs for giving them access to unimaginable riches. Without Jobs, Allen and Gates would be tech footnotes; co-founders of a once-popular, but long-forgotten office suite that (without a stolen desktop OS or resulting monopoly to repeatedly abuse) was quicken overtaken by superior solutions that weren’t bloated, spaghetti-coded, processor-hogging nightmares.