A company owned by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, filed suit on Friday against Google, Apple and nine other companies, contending that their online navigation and viewing technology illegally uses patented inventions created by Mr. Allen’s research firm, which is now defunct.

The four patents cited in the suit cover research work done by Interval Research, a Silicon Valley research organization that was founded in 1992 and shut down in 2000. It was financed by Mr. Allen and led by David E. Liddle, a former research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. What remains is a licensing arm, Interval Licensing, which is bringing the suit.

The patents, issued from 2000 to 2004, appear to be broad in their application to Internet commerce and Web viewing. They include news alerts, drawing a viewer’s attention to a display device and browsing technology for video, sound and text.

The strength of the patent claims, experts say, is not clear. They were developed by a company that invested heavily in research, not merely a patent-buying and licensing firm. But the years when these patents were granted were “deeply problematic” for the United States Patent and Trademark Office, said Josh Lerner, an intellectual property expert at the Harvard Business School.