A firm owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed a lawsuit against Google, Apple, Facebook, and other companies alleging that they have violated patents related to search, multimedia, screen pop-ups and database management.

Interval Licensing filed the patent lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington. The companies named in the lawsuit are Aol, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.

The four patents cover several technologies related to search, multimedia, databases and screen activity, said David Postman, a spokesman for Allen. Details about how the 11 defendants are allegedly infringing Interval’s patents will come out as the lawsuit progresses, he said.

Interval Licensing holds patents of Interval Research, the now-defunct company founded by Allen and David Liddle in 1992 to research information systems, communications and computer science. The patents in the lawsuit cover fundamental Web technologies first developed at Interval Research in the 1990s, Interval said in a press release.

The patents covered by the lawsuit are:

– U.S. Patent No. 6,263,507, for “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”

– U.S. Patent No. 6,034,652, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”

– U.S. Patent No. 6,788,314, for “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”

– U.S. Patent No. 6,757,682, for “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

Postman called Interval Research a “groundbreaking contributor” to the development of the commercial Internet. The patents are fundamental to the ways leading e-commerce and search companies continue to operate, he said.

Some of the named companies slammed the lawsuit.

“This lawsuit against some of America’s most innovative companies reflects an unfortunate trend of people trying to compete in the courtroom instead of the marketplace. Innovation — not litigation — is the way to bring to market the kinds of products and services that benefit millions of people around the world,” a Google representative said.

After being awarded $200m in a patent-infringement case that it brought against Microsoft, VirnetX has now gone after Apple, Cisco Systems, and others.

In a brief statement announcing the lawsuit, VirnetX accused Apple, Cisco, NEC, and the self-described “leading global enterprise communications provider” Aastra of violating five of its patents, each related to a greater or lesser extent to VPN.

Of the companies in VirnetX’s sights, the one with the most to lose is Cisco. The other three firms are merely accused of violating VirnetX’s patents “directly”, while Cisco is accused of doing so “willfully” — a charge, if proven, that could result in a painful payout of treble damages.

The suit was filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Eastern Distict of Texas, a venue popular among patent-infringement plaintiffs due to its history of rendering in their favor. Presiding over the case is Judge Leonard Davis, the George W. Bush appointee who handled not only VirnetX’s successful patent-infringment suit against Microsoft, but also i4i’s equally successful action against Redmond for Microsoft Word’s infringement of an XML-editing patent.

To complete the symmetry, the law firm representing VirnetX in the new lawsuit is the wonderfully named McKool Smith, the same firm that represented both i4i and VirnetX in their successful suits against Microsoft, and which describes itself as “one of the nation’s leading pure trial firms”.

The five US patents in question are 6,502,135; 6,839,759; 7,188,180; 7,418,504; and 7,490,151. Apple is accused of violating the first and last of those five: “Agile network protocol for secure communications with assured system availability”, filed in February 2000 and granted on the last day of 2002, and “Establishment of a secure communication link based on a domain name service (DNS) request”, filed in September 2002 and granted in February 2009.

The “Agile network” patent is one of the two over which VirnetX successfully sued Microsoft — an action that evetually led to a $200m settlement. Apple escaped being accused of violating the second of the two patents in question in the Microsoft suit, 7,188,180 (“Method for establishing secure communication link between computers of virtual private network”), but Cisco didn’t.

The networking giant has been charged with violating four of the five patents, escaping only the “domain name service” infringment accusation — and each of those four violations is tagged with the expensive word, “willfully.”

Perhaps bouyed by its success with Microsoft, and confident in its legal standing, VirnetX appears to plan more patent wrangling in the future. As the company notes in its “Corporate Backgrounder” (PDF): “We believe that we will hold the majority of 4G essential patents related to Series 33 specifications that define security standards for LTE/4G and are prepared to license the use of our patents for incorporation into 4G related products such as chips, servers, smartphones, laptop computers, etc.”

VirnetX also notes in its Backgrounder that it acquired a patent portfolio and a team of engineers from SAIC in 2006, and that: “It now serves as the foundation of our planned licensing and service offerings. We expect to derive the majority of our revenue from license fees and royalties associated with these patents.”

A Texas judge’s order that Microsoft pay more than $240 million in damages to an obscure Canadian firm and stop selling its popular Word program within 60 days appears to have triggered more patent suits against the software maker in the plaintiff-friendly Lone Star State, InformationWeek has learned.

Allvoice Developments US, a provider of speech recognition systems, and mobile software developer EMG Technology both filed suits against Microsoft in recent days in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas, where judge Leonard Davis a week ago ruled in favor of Toronto-based i4i in its action against Microsoft.

Allvoice claims that speech recognition support built into Windows XP and Windows Vista violates its patent on the technology. Allvoice also alleges that Microsoft discussed using its technology in Windows but later rejected it. Allvoice is seeking unspecified damages against Microsoft.

EMG, meanwhile, contends that Microsoft’s Windows CE, PocketPC, and Windows Mobile products infringe its patent for viewing Web content on a mobile device. EMG also lists investment broker Scottrade and Southwest Airlines in its complaint.

EMG is seeking unspecified damages.

While the actions might ordinarily be dismissed as nuisance suits brought by patent trolls (EMG, which has a barely functioning Web site, previously filed a case against Apple), Judge Davis’ stunning order last week in favor of i4i shows anything’s possible in the Eastern Texas federal court jurisdiction.

A 2006 New York Times article labeled the Eastern District’s Marshall, Texas base “the patent lawsuit capital of the nation, where plaintiffs are more likely to get a favorable judgment.” Some of the Court’s rulings have raised concerns about software patents and sparked calls for reform.

Davis last week took the unprecedented step of ordering Microsoft to stop selling Word 2003 and Word 2007 in the U.S. within 60 days. The decision shows just how far Eastern Texas jurists are willing to go—not only at the expense of corporations but also at that of consumers—to protect what they see as patent plaintiff’s rights.

Microsoft said it plans to appeal Davis’ ruling. On Friday, the company filed an emergency motion that would forestall its having to post a bond against the millions in dollars in damages Davis levied against it—including $40 million the judge imposed for what he said was Microsoft attorneys’ trial misconduct.

Source: InformationWeek