AOL Wins U.S. Patent for Instant Messaging
AOL Time Warner has quietly won a U.S. patent for instant messaging, an increasingly popular mode of online communication that the media giant already dominates.
AOL executives downplayed the significance of the patent and said they had no plans to enforce it against other instant-messaging providers.
“There are no plans to do anything with the patent at this time,” a spokesman for AOL’s Internet division, America Online, said Thursday.
The patent, issued in September, grants AOL’s instant- messaging subsidiary, ICQ, ownership rights to the technology, which enables users to chat quickly and cheaply across the Internet.
The broad wording of the patent means AOL could get an important legal leg up on rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., the other players in the potentially lucrative instant-messaging arena that have their own proprietary technologies.
Microsoft and AOL have recently embarked on a project to develop secure chat applications for corporate users, the first major effort to cash in on what has been a largely free software tool. Reuters Group is one of the biggest corporate clients, using Microsoft’s IM technology.
AOL has scores of other technology patents, including one for Internet browsing memory tags, or “cookies,” and another for secure sockets layer, an application that secures e-commerce transactions. But it has never sought to enforce these.
It has, however, been protective of its IM technology. It did not permit rivals’ proprietary IM applications to communicate with AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ for years. It now allows this in a limited fashion.
The new patent defines AOL’s instant-messaging application as one that enables users to chat with and identify one another across a specific communications network, opening up the possibility for AOL to collect royalties from rivals.
The technology was developed in the mid-1990s by a group of Israelis. A patent was filed in 1997 and was acquired by AOL in 1998 for $287 million.
AOL said it had 180 million registered AIM users and 140 million registered ICQ users. The company said 2.1 billion instant messages were sent across its network daily.
