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IBM Sues Groupon Over 1990s Patents Related To Prodigy (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: IBM is pushing big internet companies to pay patent licensing fees in part because IBM invented the Prodigy service, a precursor to the modern web. Yesterday, Big Blue filed a lawsuit against Groupon, saying the company has infringed four IBM patents, including patents 5,796,967 and 7,072,849. IBM inventors working on Prodigy "developed novel methods for presenting applications and advertisements," and "the technological innovations embodied in these patents are fundamental to the efficient communication of internet content," according to the company. The Prodigy patents were filed in 1993 and 1996, but they have "priority dates" stretching back to 1988. "Despite IBM's repeated attempts to negotiate, Groupon refuses to take a license but continues to use IBM's property," IBM lawyers write. IBM says it informed Groupon that it was infringing the '967, '849, and '346 patents as early as 2011. As for the '601 patent, IBM says that Groupon should have been on notice of that once Priceline got sued last year.
You're thinking design patents. These would be utility or method patents. It used to be 17 from the date of issue. Now it is 20 from the date of application (not counting provisionals).
The length gets fuzzy for stuff filed in the couple of years prior to 1995. Some of these patents fall into the "longer of the two" category. File something in '93 and have it issue in '99 (an unusually long review process) and maybe it could be enforceable today.
There are also adjustments to length due to snafus. Sort of a "Oops, my bad. How about we add/subtract X days?"
http://www.uspto.gov/patent/laws-and-regulations/patent-term-calculator#heading-5
These are the rules that seem to apply:
In 1861, Congress again changed the term to 17 years with no extension.
In 1994 the US signed the Uruguay Round Agreements Act changed the date from which the term was measured. Because the term was measured from the filing date of the application and not the grant date of the patent, Congress amended 35 U.S.C. 154 to provide for applications filed after June 7, 1995 that the term of a patent begins on the date that the patent issues and ends on the date that is twenty years from the date on which the application was filed in the U.S. or, if, the application contained a specific reference to an earlier filed application or applications under 35 USC 120, 121 or 365(c), twenty years from the filing date of the earliest of such application. In addition, 35 U.S.C. 154 was amended to provide term extension if the original patent was delayed due to secrecy orders, interferences, or appellate review periods.
Hate to burst their bubble, but hypertext systems predated both their claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.