August 27, 2010 - Interval Licensing LLC, a patent holding company founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, announced in a press release that it filed suit against AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.
The four patents-in-suit are related to wireless email delivery: "Browser for use in navigating a body of information, with particular application to browsing information represented by audiovisual data" (patent no. 6,263,507); "Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device" (no. 6,034,652); "Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device" (no. 6,788,314); and "Alerting users to items of current interest" (6,757,682).
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington, and ZDNet posted a copy of the patent infringement complaint.