A lawsuit by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen against a who’s who of high-tech companies has been dismissed for being too short on specifics. The suit contended that patents received by Interval Research, a now-closed company that Allen founded and headed to research new technology, were violated by Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax and Staples.
The suit was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Marsha Pechman, who gave Allen until Dec. 28 to file a more detailed complaint. Pechman wrote that the “allegations in the complaint are Spartan.” Through a spokesperson, Allen described the judge’s dismissal as only a “procedural issue,” a point on which several legal observers agree.
‘News Browser’
Apple and Google filed motions to dismiss the suit on the grounds that it didn’t indicate what products or devices the defendants offered that violated the patents.
Allen’s suit cites four patents. No. 6,263,507 covers information displayed by electronic devices “in a manner that allows the body of information to be reviewed quickly and in a flexible manner.” It gave as an example a “news browser,” which can allow a user to quickly review news stories obtained from TV broadcasts or text news sources.
Two patents, No. 6,034,652 and No. 6,788,314, are entitled Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device. They call for the presentation of information that makes use of the “unused capacity” of a display device, such as during periods when the user is not actively engaged in interaction with the device. The information, according to the patent, can also be presented during active periods of engagement, but in an unobtrusive manner, such as in a less-active portion of the screen.
Interval Research
The fourth, No. 6,757,682, concerns the alerting of users to “items…