Paul Allen Sues Apple, Others Over Patents

More people on the internet both

    - write software, and
    - don't stand to benefit directly from software patents.

Kind of troll, kind of serious. Consider the source and all that. I also think software patents are dumb, but then again I also don't stand to benefit from them and I write software.

Why waiting so long ? There should be a prescription on this type of claims. This technology is used in a very visible way for years now. So they could not ignore it and thus implicitly permitted to use it.

If they didn't knew they had these patents, how could the other company know ?

This type of pattent 'mines' will have the consequence to scare to death companies. Foreign companies will stay away of US just to avoid the risk to step on such mine. And US companies may move their business in countries with much less risks (i.e. europe, Asia).

Software patents have a strong tendency to be both vague and obvious. Although these are supposed to make something unpatentable, this doesn't happen in practice with software patents (possibly due to the relative novelty of software and lack of understanding among non-technical people).

Some background info from a /. comment: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1768970&cid=3340...

This is amusing. Here's some history on the company. Interval Research was an R&D outfit that Paul Allen founded back in the 1990's. You've never heard of it, because they were incredibly secretive. So hush-hush that when they went belly-up no one outside of the company knew about it. Literally. It took months before the Press finally got wind of it.

The place was a great place to be if you were doing research. Literally "let a thousand roses bloom". Unfortunately, they were horribly mismanaged. Allen blew hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly over budget, before he finally realized that he wasn't getting anything out it. They wanted to be the next version of SRI. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out.

Top management was, at best, incompetent. At worse, downright crooks. They hired some people on certain terms, and then shortly afterwards said "Opps - we really meant to hire you at a lower level". Truly a boneheaded move. Fortunately it didn't happen to me, but the look on people's faces when they found out was unforgettable.

Interval did some really amazing stuff; years ahead of its time. But they could never get the products out to market (though they tried), mostly due to amazing incompetence on the part of the lead engineers. You know the type. Big egos and no talent. Perhaps there was an exception to that rule, but I don't recall it.

I'm not surprised that Paul Allen has turned into a Patent Troll; it will be the only way he can get his money back. The only thing surprising is that it took him so long. But he never impressed me as being the sharpest knife in the drawer. As for other history, they had a number of big names there, from many fields. In tech, you may have heard of Lee Felsenstein if you're familiar with history. Their office was in the Research area of Palo Alto. Near Stanford, down the street from the Wall Street Journal, between Page Mill and Hillview

Despite that unfortunate ending, I still look back fondly on Interval. They paid well, too. I made lots of money off of Paul Allen. Thanks, Paul!

So then music, software, books, etc. - all requiring low capital, should be in the same realm of fashion - right? If you don't believe that's true: please compare capital of an industrial bakery to a software company of the same revenue/profit.