AOL May Strike Gold with Instant Messaging Patent

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LONDON (Reuters) - Media giant AOL Time Warner has quietly won a U.S. patent for instant messaging, a potential goldmine as the online activity rivals mobile phone text-messaging as the most popular new communication tool.

The patent, issued in September, grants AOL's instant messaging subsidiary ICQ broad ownership rights to the technology, which enables users to chat quickly and cheaply across the Internet.

The broad wording of the patent means AOL could get an important legal leg up on rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo, the other players in the potentially lucrative instant messaging (IM) arena that have their own proprietary technologies.

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News source: ActiveWin

AOL has offered little comment on the patent or whether it intends to enforce it.

"There are no plans to do anything with the patent at this time," a London spokesman for AOL's Internet division, America Online, told Reuters on Thursday.

Microsoft and AOL have recently embarked on a project to develop secure chat applications for corporate users, the first major effort to cash in on what has been a largely free software tool. Reuters Group is one of the biggest corporate clients, using Microsoft's IM technology.

AOL has scores of other technology patents, including one for Internet browsing memory tags, or "cookies," and another for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), an application that secures e-commerce transactions. But it has never sought to enforce these.

It has, however, been notoriously protective of its IM technology. It did not permit rivals' proprietary IM applications to communicate with its own AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and ICQ for years. It now allows this, albeit in a limited fashion.

The new patent defines AOL's IM application as one that enables users to chat with and identify one another across a specific "communications network," opening up the possibility for AOL to collect royalties from rivals.

Developed in the mid-1990s by a group of Israeli technologists at a company called Mirabilis, ICQ was the first breakthrough chat application. It filed a patent for its technology in 1997 and was acquired by AOL in 1998 for $287 million.

AOL said it has 180 million registered AIM users and 140 million registered ICQ users. The company said 2.1 billion instant messages were sent across its network daily.

#1 kuregu02 on 19 Dec 2002 - 15:30

Um, what about the write and talk commands in UNIX and Linux? This patent should be thrown out becuase AOL missed making this the first IM by 30 years.

#2 AaronXP on 19 Dec 2002 - 15:31

doubleposted

#3 hareball82 on 19 Dec 2002 - 15:51

that's two double posts in the same day...

#4 johanp on 19 Dec 2002 - 16:22

That stupid US Patent Office allows anything to be patented, incompetent morons.

#5 Fubar on 19 Dec 2002 - 16:38

well its US patent not world wide patent so its not gonna do much damage :/

(1 reply) #6 redavenger on 19 Dec 2002 - 18:31

Or what about the windows messenger service... WinPopup... THese predate AIM and ICQ by a good number of years...

#6.1 bluebsh on 19 Dec 2002 - 19:00

well theres a diffrence, aol has the patent on the directory server that lists whos on and offline... messageing is a diffrent thing, that has been around since networks have been almost... there trying to say they have the directory technology to determin who is on and off line

#7 Justin03248 on 19 Dec 2002 - 19:43

Ya, i'm gonna download msn messager from the UK MS site

#8 intensityx on 19 Dec 2002 - 21:53

This wouldn't hold up... They would get laughed out of the courtroom.

#9 Osiris on 20 Dec 2002 - 01:22

umm im pretty certain that ICQ actually predates Messenger. But thats noit the point gees, maybe ill go patent the right to breate oxygen, or ill go patent the photelectric effect. Obviously over exagerrating examples, but really in the end it comes down to the $$$ and if this pissy lil stunt gets it for em, well I guess theyll run with it.

#10 HowardH on 20 Dec 2002 - 16:33

My take is that this patent is more trouble to the plethora of startups now building enterprise / inter-IM products than MS or Yahoo. MS and Yahoo (and IBM with SameTime) can always create co-licensing agreements with AOL should AOL desire them. After all, AOL used IE as its browser for many years -- even as MSN started competing fiercely. The startups with < $3M USD will have much less to bargain with, and be much more vulnerable.

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