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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?"
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'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
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Methodology