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.

Comments

Wait, what?

[C0R1D4N]

Don't patents have a maximum length of 14 years? The 90s were at least 16 years ago.

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?"

Re:Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

When I worked for these bums

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:When I worked for these bums

[omnichad]

With a 5-digit UID, your patent probably expired by now.

IBM wants theirs before Groupon declares

[turkeydance]

bankruptcy.

Re:IBM wants theirs before Groupon declares

[rahvin112]

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!

Re:IBM wants theirs before Groupon declares

[michelcolman]

Did they get a patent on that?

so conflicted

[Gravis Zero]

i hate patents but i really hate advertising. i don't know who to root for!

Wither IBM

[mattyj]

Patent trolls now? Wow. Charles Flint is rolling over in his grave.

Re:Wither IBM

[UnknownSoldier]

I'm sorry but patent 1,234,567 explicitly documents posthumous rotational corpus per subterranean casket. Would you be interested in licensing our technology? If so please make a check out to:

Ignoramus
Blackmail
Methodology

patent trolling

[zlives]

when real business ideas have failed and rats a re leaving ship.

Claiming patent on web pages with javascript?

[presidenteloco]

Patent 5,796,967 looks like a patent on programs which send page templates and executable code to a client machine to display a dynamic user interface with buttons and text and stuff.

Doesn't this kind of mean they're claiming they've patented the dynamic web in general?

New IBM strategy, perhaps though up by "No Shit Sherlock" the top-secret successor to Watson:

"What is: Laying off our innovation staff and relying on wild-ass patent trolling for profit, Alex?"

Re:Claiming patent on web pages with javascript?

[vux984]

How is that patent not expired?

filed in 1993, published in 1998, priority date is 1988

Its over 20 years from the filing date, and over 17 years from its publication date.

It should be expired right?

So are they suing groupon for license fees from at least a few years ago?

Re:Shut 'er down folks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Pay up

[VikingNation]

I hold the patent for a business process that involves firing employees to help the company recover. IBM has chosen to use that process and they are not paying me any royalty fees.

I'm starting to worry about this

[rsilvergun]

kind of thing. Patent trolling used to be beneath IBM. Maybe it's 'cause of oil prices in the tank & big investors pressuring for the kind of returns they saw when gas was $4+/gallon. Then again this stuff goes back to 2011. At any rate something's got IBM desperate for new lines of business and fresh cash.

frames were VERY non-obvious to Microsoft in 1990s

[raymorris]

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.

I miss the innovative IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss the IBM that created innovative mainframes, personal computers, floppy disks, commercial laser printers, UPC Codes, type writers, and other great inventions.
Now IBM's plan is to squeeze weak companies like Groupon with questionable patents?

Re:Shut 'er down folks

[Intron]

Hate to burst their bubble, but hypertext systems predated both their claims.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'll get pilloried for saying this but

[goombah99]

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.

Re:I'll get pilloried for saying this but

[BlueCoder]

The problem is the so called inventions. They are obvious and natural conclusions. There is no revolutionary idea or inspiration. Patents are to reward and motivate people to develop ideas, implement and produce useful products. These inventions were inevitable. If you could wipe everyone mind in the world and all evidence someone would "invent" it within a week if not days. There is no need to reward these "inventions". It is not revolutionary. It's nothing like the invention of transistors or semiconductors.

Remember whenb IBM ...

[houghi]

Remember when people said IBM would only use it as self defense and would never use it to attack? Those were fun times.

Nothing bad can happen after this, because this is the only one they have, right?