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Closer Look at the Interval Licensing LLC Patents (Part 3 of 4)

In a previous post, the patent infringement law suit filed by Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing LLC against numerous technology companies, including AOL, Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, and Netflix, was noted. We decided to take a closer look at each of the patents asserted to be infringed in the case.

6,788,314Attention Manager For Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device


This patent is a continuation of U.S. Patent No. 6,034,652, which was discussed in the previous post. A continuation application is a patent application  to pursue additional claims to subject matter disclosed in an earlier application of the applicant.

In this case, the claims focus on a method for providing content from more than one remote source to a computer system having a “content display system” that can display the content to the user.   Along with the content, each content provider can “control at least one of the duration, sequencing, and timing of the display”.  Interestingly, the claims set forth that “each content provider provides its content data to the content display system independently of each other content provider and without the content data being aggregated at a common physical location”.  This means that there is no third party data aggregation of the content.

Claim 1 recites:

    1.          A method for engaging the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device, comprising the steps of:
    providing one or more sets of content data to a content display system associated with the display device and located entirely in the same physical location as the display device;
    providing to the content display system a set of instructions for enabling the content display system to selectively display, in an unobtrusive manner that does not distract a user of the display device or an apparatus associated with the display device from a primary interaction with the display device or apparatus, an image or images generated from a set of content data; and

    auditing the display of sets of content data by the content display system;

    wherein each associated content provider is located in a different physical location than at least one other content provider and each content provider provides its content data to the content display system independently of each other content provider and without the content data being aggregated at a common physical location remote from the content display system prior to being provided to the content display system, and wherein for each set the respective content provider may provide scheduling instructions tailored to the set of content data to control at least one of the duration, sequencing, and timing of the display of said image or images generated from the set of content data.