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IBM Sues Groupon Over 1990s Patents Related To Prodigy (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the precursor-to-the-modern-web dept.

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.

10 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Wait, what? by C0R1D4N · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Wait, what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?"

  2. so conflicted by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  3. patent trolling by zlives · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  4. Pay up by VikingNation · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  5. Re:IBM wants theirs before Groupon declares by rahvin112 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  6. frames were VERY non-obvious to Microsoft in 1990s by raymorris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Shut 'er down folks by Intron · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  8. Re:Wither IBM by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

  9. Re:IBM wants theirs before Groupon declares by michelcolman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Did they get a patent on that?