IBM Wins $83 Million From Groupon In E-Commerce Patents Case (bloomberg.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A U.S. jury awarded International Business Machines Corp. $83.5 million after finding that Groupon Inc. infringed four of its e-commerce patents. Friday's verdict cements the prowess of IBM's portfolio of more than 45,000 patents and is a boon to its intellectual-property licensing revenue, which brought in $1.19 billion in 2017. The jury in Wilmington, Delaware, sided with the argument of IBM's lawyers, who had said Groupon was trying to portray IBM as claiming to have patented the Internet and had called that effort "a smoke screen." As they began the trial, IBM's lawyers said Groupon built its online coupon business on the back of IBM's e-commerce inventions without permission.
[T]he patents at issue don't protect IBM's products or services, said David Hadden, Groupon's lawyer. IBM never used the patents and instead relies on its huge portfolio to extract money from other companies, he said. Two of the patents, one of which expired in 2015, came out of the Prodigy online service, which started in the late 1980s and predated the web. Another, which expired in 2016, is related to preserving information in a continuing conversation between clients and servers. The fourth patent is related to authentication and expires in 2025, the latest among the case's patents. IBM stressed throughout the trial that a range of companies have paid for licenses to use its patents. Tech giants such as Amazon, Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have paid from $20 million to $50 million each in cross-licensing agreements, allowing them access to IBM's cadre of more than 45,000 patents.
[T]he patents at issue don't protect IBM's products or services, said David Hadden, Groupon's lawyer. IBM never used the patents and instead relies on its huge portfolio to extract money from other companies, he said. Two of the patents, one of which expired in 2015, came out of the Prodigy online service, which started in the late 1980s and predated the web. Another, which expired in 2016, is related to preserving information in a continuing conversation between clients and servers. The fourth patent is related to authentication and expires in 2025, the latest among the case's patents. IBM stressed throughout the trial that a range of companies have paid for licenses to use its patents. Tech giants such as Amazon, Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have paid from $20 million to $50 million each in cross-licensing agreements, allowing them access to IBM's cadre of more than 45,000 patents.
What's more evil? (Score:2)
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Replying to undo wrong mod.
At where I am there were tendencies of small restaurants to attempt to wriggle at the terms of dining and extra charges (10% service charge and 7% GST being included in a normal bill in our country, which IF owners have gotten only 25% from groupon here too hey practically were giving away free food) are redeemable with groupon, which I suspect was motivated by their regret and them literally having no more money to pay their own employees the 10% service charge they're entitled
Nothing to see here (Score:2)
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Also:
If you can't innovate, litigate!
IBM is right (Score:1)
I'm not fan of the patent system, but it is what it is and everbody is playing the same game with the same rules. IBM is very smart in investing on patents. Be the first to protect an idea/method and then lets see if it will be worth. It is not straightforward to generate patents... in fact, IBM generates lots of them (leader on patents for more than 15 years) but propably few are actually driving revenue. Most of them are for product protection or to ensure an open technology (patenting and allowing free u
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Ironically ... (Score:5, Funny)
Blame the system, not the trolls. (Score:3, Informative)
Group-on wouldn't exist if it had to buy patents when it was setting up. The same thing applies to all those tech giants now trading in patents. This irony seems lost.
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Rent seeking (Score:4, Insightful)
It's either that or we keep sliding into oligarchy. One thing you're _not_ gonna get is small government and small corporations. You just leave a power vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum and all that.
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I'll do you one better and not call "physical property" property. That's a loaded term designed to let you keep stuff that I want.
Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own (Score:4, Insightful)
When IBM shows up and asks if you want to pay a flat rate to license its 45,000 patents-in-force, what can you do? Finding out whether you infringe any of 45,000 patents is prohibitively expensive. Groupon rolled the dice, IBM went to its stupendous pile of patents, and Groupon is where it is today.
Stalin certainly was right when it comes to patent portfolios.
From TFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
"IBM invests nearly $6 billion annually in research and development, producing innovations for society," IBM spokesman Doug Shelton said after the verdict. "We rely on our patents to protect our innovations."
Mr. Shelton then continued: "As a perfect example, look to our patent for drawing thick lines [google.com]. Think of how unfortunate the world would be if IBM hadn't invested so much effort in the research of drawing thick lines! Clearly, we should be allowed to profit from our innovation, for at least seventeen years. If the rest of the world wants to share in our innovation, a seat at the table only cost a few tens of millions of dollars."
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Drawing multi-pixel lines and having segments "match up" properly (aesthetically) is not trivial to do well.
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Was it because I had come up with something worthy of a patent? Nope. It was because I was a competent programmer and doing the same things that pretty much every other competent programmer doing the same type of work
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-1, invoked generality of patent title or abstract instead of the specificity of patent claims.