Suing Silicon Valley
Paul Allen became a billionaire by co-founding Microsoft, whose software dominates the personal computer industry. Now Allen is seeking to expand that fortune by suing some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, which he accuses of violating heretofore unheard-of patents on some core Internet technologies.
The lawsuit by Allen’s Interval Licensing is based on four patents obtained since 2000 by Interval Research, a defunct research and development shop that Allen set up with David Liddle in 1992. The complaint doesn’t say exactly what the 11 defendants have done to violate the patents, which cover key aspects of e-commerce, online search and information aggregation. But the patents’ claims are so astoundingly broad that they encompass such common features of the Web as news feeds and product recommendations.
The sad thing about the case is that it’s not unusual. Seemingly every week a new lawsuit trumpets an obscure, years-old patent that allegedly covers some fundamental aspect of information technology. It doesn’t matter if the defendants didn’t know about the patent or developed their technology using an entirely different method; if the patent’s claims cover what the defendants are doing, under federal law they’re liable.
A whole industry has developed around these battles. Entrepreneurs are snapping up existing but overlooked patents either to assert novel claims against tech companies or to sell those companies protection against lawsuits. As a result, patents are no longer merely the means to an end sought by this country’s founders — namely, encouraging scientific and technological progress — but an end in and of themselves.
Many of the largest U.S. technology firms have urged Congress to end patent shakedowns. Their proposed solutions, however, have been resisted by pharmaceutical companies and honest-to-goodness inventors whose interests are protected, albeit imperfectly, by the current system.
Allen is a technology pioneer, as were many of the inventors at Interval Research, and his dispute with Silicon Valley may well be more legitimate than that of a garden-variety patent troll. But his lawsuit draws policymakers’ attention to several nagging problems, including patents so broad and indefinite that they extend far beyond the invention they were supposed to protect and patent disputes that emerge years after the alleged infringement began. Congress should be able to resolve these issues without reducing the incentives for inventors that patents were supposed to safeguard. A good starting point would be to give the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office the resources needed to examine patent applications more thoroughly. If not, we hope the courts will continue to restore balance to the patent system case by case.
