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