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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.
Don't patents have a maximum length of 14 years? The 90s were at least 16 years ago.
A substantial part of the annual employee review depended on how "innovative" you were.
Guess how that was assessed? Spot on. That's a large part of their business model.
when real business ideas have failed and rats a re leaving ship.
Oh how quickly we forget. British Telecom used to claim ownership of the web. In 2000 they sued Prodigy, claiming that Prodigy infringed its patent (U.S. Patent 4,873,662) on web hyperlinks. Prodigy has already been sued for this type of crap.
No IBM wants to get paid because they are trying to hit some super ridiculous profit margin growth targets. They are laying off 10's of thousands of US employees right now and it's going to be the death of IBM IMO because they are selling out the future for short term profits. They are going to turn into the biggest patent troll the world has ever seen but their profit margins will be phenomenal when the only employees are lawyers!
In the early 1990s, Microsoft spent something like a hundred million dollars developing a technology suite which was immediately eplaced by the html tags , , and .
This is one of two reasons that Microsoft absolutely freaked out when the web started becoming popular - it did the same thing as their new "killer app", in a MUCH simpler way. Their new COM technology was a newer version of something they called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). The web had a much simpler way to link and embed documents.
For a little while, Microsoft even tried to stop the web from becoming popular. When it was obvious that wouldn't work, they tried marketing COM as a web technology, under the name ActiveX.
Anyway, they had invested very heavily in trying to solve the same problem that frames solved, but their solution was a super- complex solution that took years to develop and an 800 page book to explain. A solution so simple as wasn't obvious to Microsoft.
It isn't really that crazy to believe that IBM pioneered techniques for internet activity. It was not at all obvious back in the days of prodigy when people used things like Gopher and Archie more than WWW protocols. The were investing in the technology and they patented it.
About the only thing one might complain about here is not the patents but the fact they submarined this. Surfacing decades later and then suing ordinary users just is lousy. But as long as the patents are legit, it may not be unreasonable.
Not all patents are bad. Certainly patents in cases where huge technology changes are being established.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.