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11 September 2014Patents

Microsoft founder’s Apple, Google lawsuit revived

A patent lawsuit brought by Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, against AOL, Apple, Google and Yahoo has been revived after a US appeals court dismissed part of an earlier ruling.

In a judgment issued yesterday (September 10), the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said an earlier ruling, which cleared the companies of infringing a patent belonging to Allen’s secondary company Interval Research Corporation (IRC), should be reconsidered.

The patent in question, US number 6,034,652, surrounds messages displayed to internet users.

The lawsuit was filed initially in 2010 by Interval Licencing, the technology licencing arm of the now defunct IRC, which claimed the technology companies infringed the patent by using the commonly seen pop-ups on websites.

In 2013, the US District Court for the Western District of Washington sided in favour of the defendants but the Court of Appeals said district judge Marsha Pechman had erred in her judgment and had erroneously interpreted the patent.

AOL, Apple, Google and Yahoo claimed the language of the patent covered only situations in which information was displayed on background wallpapers and screensavers, and not pop-ups.

But the Court of Appeals said the judgement  should be overturned based on the “erroneous claim construction” of the term “attention manager” used in the patent.

“The primary issues raised on appeal center on the manner in which the patented invention displays content data—specifically, how the attention manager displays ‘images’ so as to attract the peripheral attention of the user,” the appeals court wrote.

“Based on the erroneous claim construction of ‘attention manager’ we therefore vacate the judgments of non-infringement,” the court added.

The appeals court agreed with Pechman on the invalidation of certain claims made over the same patent, and a second one, ruling that they were too ambiguous.

The case will now return to the district court for further consideration.

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