Epress.am News from Armenia
A firm owned by billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen today sued Apple, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and seven other companies, charging them with infringing patents filed more than a decade ago.
Google and Facebook blasted the lawsuit as “unfortunate” and “without merit,” reports Reuters, sourcing Computerworld.
The complaint, filed Friday morning in a Seattle federal court, named AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and Google’s YouTube.
AOL, Apple, Google and Yahoo were each charged with four claims of patent infringement, while Facebook was hit with one. The other eight companies were charged with two claims each.
The suit does not name Microsoft , which Allen co-founded with Bill Gates in 1975 but left in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Microsoft did not reply to a request asking whether it had licensed some or all of the applicable patents from Allen’s firm.
Allen’s lawsuit claimed that the 11 companies violated patents developed by Internal Research, a Silicon Valley research lab he funded in 1992, but which shut its doors in 2000.
“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,” said Google.
Allen’s suit seeks unspecified damages, as well as injunctions that would block the accused companies from continuing to use the patented technologies.