Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM Wins $83 Million From Groupon In E-Commerce Patents Case (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the raking-it-in dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A U.S. jury awarded International Business Machines Corp. $83.5 million after finding that Groupon Inc. infringed four of its e-commerce patents. Friday's verdict cements the prowess of IBM's portfolio of more than 45,000 patents and is a boon to its intellectual-property licensing revenue, which brought in $1.19 billion in 2017. The jury in Wilmington, Delaware, sided with the argument of IBM's lawyers, who had said Groupon was trying to portray IBM as claiming to have patented the Internet and had called that effort "a smoke screen." As they began the trial, IBM's lawyers said Groupon built its online coupon business on the back of IBM's e-commerce inventions without permission.

[T]he patents at issue don't protect IBM's products or services, said David Hadden, Groupon's lawyer. IBM never used the patents and instead relies on its huge portfolio to extract money from other companies, he said. Two of the patents, one of which expired in 2015, came out of the Prodigy online service, which started in the late 1980s and predated the web. Another, which expired in 2016, is related to preserving information in a continuing conversation between clients and servers. The fourth patent is related to authentication and expires in 2025, the latest among the case's patents. IBM stressed throughout the trial that a range of companies have paid for licenses to use its patents. Tech giants such as Amazon, Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have paid from $20 million to $50 million each in cross-licensing agreements, allowing them access to IBM's cadre of more than 45,000 patents.

33 comments

  1. Pay IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In coupons. tampoons? harpoons?

  2. What's more evil? by pilaftank · · Score: 2

    I'm torn... what's more evil? Patent trolls extorting licensing fees for general purpose obvious technologies or Groupon's business model?

    --
    dna.js
    1. Re:What's more evil? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is (LITERALLY) Groupon's business model:

      "Dear small business owner, will you please shoot yourself in the foot by taking your price and multiplying it by 25%? We will charge 50% of your normal price, pocket 50% of it ourselves as a fee, and then you get the other 25% and we advertise it to consumers as a 25% sale of normal price?" (Sometimes it's 25% business owner / 25% groupon / 50% discount for consumer.) Then they go on to say: "You'll lose all sorts of money in the short term, but in the long run, you'll gain customers!"

      I wish I was kidding, I hope I'm not patent infringing for copy-pasting their ideas, LOL. Some gullible businesses are actually suckered into this deal, most are just days away from bankruptcy anyway.

      As a consumer, you can take advantage of it like this: Go into any restaurant and immediately ask for a discount, saying that it will be much cheaper to take your discount than to play Groupon's game and have Groupon take a huge cut.

    2. Re:What's more evil? by hai_Priesty · · Score: 1

      Replying to undo wrong mod.

      At where I am there were tendencies of small restaurants to attempt to wriggle at the terms of dining and extra charges (10% service charge and 7% GST being included in a normal bill in our country, which IF owners have gotten only 25% from groupon here too hey practically were giving away free food) are redeemable with groupon, which I suspect was motivated by their regret and them literally having no more money to pay their own employees the 10% service charge they're entitled to.

      Then groupon probably run out of business owners to fool here, and groupon Singapore was sold off to by another company last year.

  3. Nothing to see here by maestroX · · Score: 1

    Weak defence, though admittedly I'm biased and think Groupon to be a shady business. Fscking hard to find which patents are actually compromised.

  4. Those who can't do, sue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The new American business model.

    1. Re:Those who can't do, sue by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      Also:

      If you can't innovate, litigate!

    2. Re: Those who can't do, sue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      thing is, your mom does do, and then she sues for child support so your logic is off chief

    3. Re:Those who can't do, sue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Personal favorite ::

      "If It Doesn't Fit, You Must Acquit"

      CAP === 'holies' /., it's not even a word, damn it!

    4. Re:Those who can't do, sue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      'holies' is a word. It's used in the Christian phrase "holy of holies" or "holiest of holies".

      It's not a very sensible word, but it's a word.

  5. nothing is evil here, fool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    stop with the sophomoric hyperbole, assclown

    1. Re:nothing is evil here, fool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Suck my dick, gay boy. You are less than nothing. You are a defect. A human defect that should have been smothered at birth. Homos are flaws. Your opinion means nothing faggot.

  6. IBM is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I'm not fan of the patent system, but it is what it is and everbody is playing the same game with the same rules. IBM is very smart in investing on patents. Be the first to protect an idea/method and then lets see if it will be worth. It is not straightforward to generate patents... in fact, IBM generates lots of them (leader on patents for more than 15 years) but propably few are actually driving revenue. Most of them are for product protection or to ensure an open technology (patenting and allowing free usage before someone else tries to make $$$)

    1. Re:IBM is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How do we know you are a real person and not Project Master Debater?

    2. Re:IBM is right by raftpeople · · Score: 1

      Patents are supposed to be non-obvious. That is the big problem, 99.99999999% of software patents are pretty damn obvious to a competent dev.

  7. Patents stiffle innovation more than it helps by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can i patent how i walk my dog or scratch my genitalia? Some of these patients need to be reviewed for being to broad

  8. Ironically ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Funny

    Groupon had a e-coupon to reduce the award to IBM, but using it would violate another IBM patent.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  9. Blame the system, not the trolls. by jago25_98 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Group-on wouldn't exist if it had to buy patents when it was setting up. The same thing applies to all those tech giants now trading in patents. This irony seems lost.

    --
    A blog I run for the wealth
    1. Re:Blame the system, not the trolls. by raftpeople · · Score: 1

      And those patents shouldn't exist in the first place due to the non-obvious test.

  10. Imagine you invent a 'door'... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    You invent a 'door', and let's say this is a 'reasonable' act of invention.

    Now my question is this. Is the DOORKNOB also a reasonable act of 'invention' or a plainly OBVIOUS requrement that anyone would come up with if they had a need to open said door?

    These junk patents that corporate criminals (ever read about IBM and the nazi death camps?) use to extort money are exactly analageous to the doorknob. The first to use internet (or internet like) systems hhad a need for many 'doorknobs'- but each doorknob would have been a painfully obvious idea to any person versed in computer science who happened to work on such systems.

    First to do a thing (or have the need to do a thing) is NOT automatically the same as 'invention'. But crimal corporations like IBM have the lawmakers in their pockets. So while patent law APPEARS to exclude the plainly obvious from lawfully 'protected' invention, in practice 99.99% of all IBM patents are the plainly obvious.

    Now watch the paid shills tell you otherwise. From IBM's illegal profits come the funds to pay many many shills to blitz outlets like this one with pro IBM rhetoric.

    1. Re:Imagine you invent a 'door'... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've gone through plenty of doors that don't require door knobs, or even door handles.

      The knob would likely be part of the door lock patent rather than the door patent.

  11. appeal will sort this out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    an appeal will be in the hands of a sane judge not an insane stupid technologically illiterate jury of idiots. this patent is going to be revoked. all we need is a sane judge for the appeal then no award. ibm is a parasitic troll and should just be shot in the head.

  12. IBM is Wrong. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IBM supported nazis. IBM is Wrong.

  13. Rent seeking by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    this is why high corporate taxes are good. If you let them then the corps will use regular cyclic downturns and psuedo-guild systems to take ownership of all physical property and intellectual output (I'm not calling it IP, that's a loaded term designed to legitimize bad patents and perpetual copyright). High taxes keep too much economic power from concentrating into the hands of a few. The government then spends this money keeping it from concentrating too much in their hands.

    It's either that or we keep sliding into oligarchy. One thing you're _not_ gonna get is small government and small corporations. You just leave a power vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum and all that.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:Rent seeking by DRJlaw · · Score: 1

      to take ownership of all physical property and intellectual output (I'm not calling it IP, that's a loaded term designed to legitimize bad patents and perpetual copyright).

      I'll do you one better and not call "physical property" property. That's a loaded term designed to let you keep stuff that I want.

  14. Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own by Artagel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When IBM shows up and asks if you want to pay a flat rate to license its 45,000 patents-in-force, what can you do? Finding out whether you infringe any of 45,000 patents is prohibitively expensive. Groupon rolled the dice, IBM went to its stupendous pile of patents, and Groupon is where it is today.

    Stalin certainly was right when it comes to patent portfolios.

  15. From TFA... by null+etc. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "IBM invests nearly $6 billion annually in research and development, producing innovations for society," IBM spokesman Doug Shelton said after the verdict. "We rely on our patents to protect our innovations."

    Mr. Shelton then continued: "As a perfect example, look to our patent for drawing thick lines. Think of how unfortunate the world would be if IBM hadn't invested so much effort in the research of drawing thick lines! Clearly, we should be allowed to profit from our innovation, for at least seventeen years. If the rest of the world wants to share in our innovation, a seat at the table only cost a few tens of millions of dollars."

    1. Re:From TFA... by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      Drawing multi-pixel lines and having segments "match up" properly (aesthetically) is not trivial to do well.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:From TFA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The field of computer graphics probably contains more mines than the former border of East Germany, patently speaking. But now we know the cost of online business: pay millions of protection money to IBM and give them access to your secrets, or they go all nazi on your company.

    3. Re:From TFA... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Granted, the blind and sighted mathematicians could be fooled by the dense patent text, but surely blind mathematicians must know IBM has a patent on at least one impossible innovation. The patent is indeed a sham, but not why you'd think. Graphically representing thick lines is not possible on any two-dimensional display or substrate, same as it is not possible to draw wide lines on a one-dimensional display. Isn't this math? Where is the outrage? Did IBM pay off sighted mathematicians to keep silent? Were mute ones paid anything? Why aren't the blind complaining? They would surely benefit from such an innovation, were it possible. But the blind mathematicians really dropped the ball.

    4. Re:From TFA... by radarskiy · · Score: 1

      -1, invoked generality of patent title or abstract instead of the specificity of patent claims.

    5. Re:From TFA... by raftpeople · · Score: 1

      Your comment led me to read the patent thinking that maybe this one is legit. Unfortunately it's as ridiculous as most software patents. I used this exact same technique under some conditions back when I was in high school writing video games on the trash 80 color computer (around 1982).

      Was it because I had come up with something worthy of a patent? Nope. It was because I was a competent programmer and doing the same things that pretty much every other competent programmer doing the same type of work was doing.

  16. Disappointing Outcome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Until you have actually experienced a lawsuit by a patent troll you don't fully realize how stacked the deck is in favor of them. This lawsuit just further demonstrates how little recourse businesses have to this sort of extortion. All of these patents fail the obviousness test by anyone who works in software, and the fact that IBMs SSO patent is valid until 2025 and has now been upheld by a court should terrify everyone. The infringement accusations for the '346 "single-sign-on" patent say that Groupon infringes because it has an option to sign in using Facebook. Seriously.....