IBM
has begun to push large-scale Internet companies to pay patent licensing fee
because IBM invented the Prodigy Service, which is patented and came before the
current version of the Internet. On March 2 IBM filed a lawsuit against Groupon
claiming that Groupon infringed on four IBM patents, two crucial ones being
5,796,967, and 7,072,849. IBM claims that Groupon infringed on Prodigy, which
is defined by IBM as the novel method for presenting applications and
advertisements. The complaint by IBM was filed in a federal court in Delaware,
and is a very similar lawsuit to the one that IBM brought against other large Internet
giants Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable. Other allegations in the case involve
patent 5,961,01 that claims to preserve that state between a client and a
server. It legitimizes the “single sign on technology,” which enables anyone
using the site to authorize that it is the client once during each session.
This may seem obvious at first and way to broad to patent, but it is clearly
stated in IBM’s patent 7,631,346.
IBM
is fiercely claiming that this is willful patent infringement because Groupon
has made no strides in seeking a licensing agreement after several attempts to
reach out from IBM’s legal team. IBM apparently notified Groupon that it had
infringed on ‘967, ‘849, and ‘346 in 2011 and has since informed Groupon with
no response. IBM engineers who invented the technology in these three patents
assert that the applications enable data and program code to be much more
efficient in the Prodigy system then conventional systems.
IBM
has had success in the past with their patent infringement cases, winning a
settlement from Twitter for $36 million in 2013 when Twitter was on the verge
of its IPO. In 2006, IBM sued Amazon in Terry, Texas, the notorious
pro-plaintiff Eastern District Court of Texas over patents that involved
foundational online commerce.
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