Paul Allen

If the headline above qualifies as disseminating to a participant an indication that an item of current interest to that participant is accessible by the participant via a network, after receiving that indication in real time from a source other than the participant ... well, we might have just run afoul of one of Paul Allen's patents.

OK, so our process wasn't exactly automated, but it illustrates the extraordinarily fundamental nature of the approaches in dispute in the lawsuit filed Friday by Allen against Google, Apple, eBay, Facebook and numerous other giants of the online world.

The case will require the courts to time-warp back to the web's formative years -- when the patent filings were made by the Microsoft co-founder's Interval Research lab -- and ask the questions: Were the people working for him truly on the cutting edge at the time? Or was all this stuff as obvious back then as it would be now?

"The patents are well drafted," writes law professor Dennis Crouch, assessing the filings on his Patently-O blog. "Of course, even excellent drafting cannot cure obviousness problems. I suspect that the litigation will focus primarily on whether these inventions were obvious back when the patents were filed. In addition to arguing in court, I expect that the defendants will also appeal to the US Patent Office -- asking the agency to take a second look at the patents via reexamination."

Here's a closer look at each of the four patents cited in the case.

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U.S. Patent 6,263,507: "Browser for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audiovisual data." Application filed Dec. 1996, patent issued July 2001.

This patent essentially outlines the common format of a modern-day online news portal. According to the filing, the idea is to gather information from various sources -- such as different wire services or television news programs -- and present it in a way that can be "quickly reviewed to obtain an overview of the content of the body of information," while also displaying related items and indicating to the user which items have already been read.

The suit alleges that AOL, Apple, eBay, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube have violated the patent "by making and using websites, hardware, and software to categorize, compare, and display segments of a body of information."

U.S. Patent 6,757,682: "Alerting users to items of current interest." Application filed September 2000, patent issued June 2004.

In basic terms, this patent would appear to include the "if you like this, then you'll also like this" assessment that many sites make (either explicitly or behind the scenes) to personalize the online experience for their users. The patent describes a system that would receive an indication that an item is of interest to the user, assess the intensity of the user's potential interest, and alert the user that the item is of interest.

The irony is that the poster child for this approach is Amazon.com, which is not named among the eleven defendants in the suit. Allen's Vulcan Inc. investment company developed Amazon's new headquarters in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood. Also absent, of course, is Microsoft.

The suit alleges that AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube have violated the patent by "making and using websites and associated hardware and software to provide alerts that information is of current interest to a user" as claimed in the patent.

U.S. Patents 6,034,652 and 6,788,314: "Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device." One was filed in March 1996 and issued March 2000; while the other was filed in March 2000 and issued September 2004.

These patents describe using the "unused capacity" of a display screen to "occupy the user's peripheral attention" with content, "providing information to the person that the person might not otherwise expend adequate energy to obtain." Content examples cited in the applications include stock ticker information and advertisements.

The suit alleges that AOL, Yahoo, Google and Apple are violating the patents by "making, using, offering, providing, and encouraging customers to use products that display information in a way that occupies the peripheral attention of the user."

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