Apple Inc, Oath Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google on Friday won a ruling from a federal appeals court invalidating claims in a 'pop up' computer notification patent they were accused of infringing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said a patent owned by Interval Licensing LLC was invalid because it described the basic, abstract idea of "displaying a second set of data without interfering with a first set of data." For more on this, sign into Westlaw here.

Interval Licensing is run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

The patent in question may either be 6,034,652 or 6,788,314. Both patents carry the same title "Attention manager for occupying the peripheral attention of a person in the vicinity of a display device."

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