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Allen’s pop-up patent case is revived

by on11 September 2014

You can’t keep a good troll down

A US appeals court revived part of a patent lawsuit brought by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen against AOL, Apple, Google and Yahoo. Now few people would want to be acknowledged as the inventor of pop-ups, but not Allen who has been suing the others claiming they owe him a fortune for nicking his invention.

Allen lost his case in 2013 when Chief Judge Marsha Pechman of the federal district court in Seattle said that the four had not breached his patent. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit now says that Pechman had made an "erroneous" interpretation of the patent in 2013 and it sent the case back to her for further hearings.

At the same time, Circuit Judge Raymond Chen agreed with Pechman for invalidating certain claims made over the same Interval patent, and a second one, declaring them too ambiguous. Interval Licensing sued the tech companies in 2010 for allegedly infringing four of its patents, although only two became the subject of the appeal. It said they infringed the patents through products and software that use pop-up notifications, court documents said.

Allen and partner David Liddle founded Interval Research in 1992. It employed over 110 scientists and engineers and was granted 300 patents during its existence, according to court documents.

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