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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.
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.