Billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen sued 11 big names in the web namely Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Youtube, eBay, AOL, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples.

The suit was filed against the companies for allegedly violating four patents owned by his now-defunct program, Interval Research.

One of the four patents is said to cover internet commerce basics such as product recommendations based on the pages that users are viewing. The other one is about allowing the readers of a news story to see other stories based on the current one. The two other patents are on showing information such as news updates and stock quotes on a web page.

Allen’s link with Google is through the alleged funding of Interval Research of the Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page’s research that would eventually become Google. Paul Allen’s lawsuit came just a week after Oracle sued Google for patent violations over the open source Java programming language used in the mobile phone operating system of Google’s Android.

Perplexed by all this legal drama? A leisurely visit to Gadgetepoint. will surely give you your well-deserved fix… the gadgets are so cool and the deals are so great, you’ll think it’s almost illegal.