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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.
bankruptcy.
i hate patents but i really hate advertising. i don't know who to root for!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Patent trolls now? Wow. Charles Flint is rolling over in his grave.
when real business ideas have failed and rats a re leaving ship.
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?"
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.