| 30 August 2010
Paul Allen didn’t help his reputation as an owner in Portland and even around the league with his handling of Kevin Pritchard’s firing and now his defiant patent infringement lawsuit issued against some of the Internet’s biggest corporations remains Allen's encore.
One of those twelve corporations is YouTube - which is owned by Google and Allen claims - has built its extraordinarily successful business around his technological ideas.
The portion of Allen’s lawsuit that refers to the site is very broad, pertaining to video images that flash up onto a computer screen and could turn into a game of one-on-one between Allen and YouTube.
Particular claims against YouTube include allowing, “a site to offer suggestions to consumers for items related to what they're currently viewing, or related to online activities of others in the case of social-networking sites” and allowing “readers of a news story to quickly locate stories related to a particular subject, among other things.”
Ironically, there are many videos that feature Allen on YouTube.
One profiles his obscenely large yacht, another has Allen recently reflecting on the Blazers season with announcer Mike Barrett, a third is a friendly courtside altercation with Shaquille O’Neal, a fourth documents his 2007 net worth at $22 billion and, of course, a fifth of him playing a little Jimi Hendrix in a 1995 concert.
Aside from YouTube, Allen seems to have sued everyone under the sun but Microsoft (while Twitter apparently couldn't be touched), the company he co-founded in 1975 and left in 1983. It has since used the same concepts described in the lawsuit, and yet this corporation is absent. Not surprisingly, this exclusion and Allen’s claim in general have created a great deal of uproar. Allen is giving away most of his $13 billion fortune. That is extraordinary. But given that, why is he now dropping this patent bomb? Is it just to feed his ego?
According to one person connected with Microsoft, Allen "has countless of patents and is basically looking to cash in on them."
"He likely has a strong case here," the person told Beyond the Beat.
Allen is characterized as a patent troll, someone who enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers. He is doing this to try to compensate for performing poorly in the market—to try to make a comeback in the courts. It is hard to understand how these multi-billion dollar companies can be attacked like this for building upon a product, creating jobs, being innovative, and ultimately becoming vey successful, but Allen felt the need to deliver a potential internet-damaging blow.
YouTube just happens to be on the receiving end.
Evidently, what made those clips of Allen and millions of other videos possible for online viewing was Allen's own creation.
photo: wsj.com
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