Paul Allen has filed a lawsuit naming AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube. The co-founder of Microsoft alleges that they have violated his patents for search, multimedia, screen pop-ups and database management.
Allen’s company, Interval Licensing, holds patents originally produced by Interval Research, a company founded in 1992 by Allen and David Little. The patents produced by Interval in research information systems, communications and computer science formed some of the foundations of the Web as we know it, at least according to the release by Interval.
