IBM seeks $167M from Groupon in dispute over early internet patents | Hacker News Reader

IBM seeks $167M from Groupon in dispute over early internet patents

reuters.com

95 pointsJerry232 comments

You know a company is in its last legs when it turns to patent-trolling.

Its business!

This is one of the oldest companies in existence. It is hardly on its last legs.

Also, patents are a huge revenue stream at IBM. Always have been. However, that merely makes them the original patent troll. :)

> This is one of the oldest companies in existence

One of the oldest tech companies.

There are many hundreds of companies that have been around longer than the United States.

And this is worth the distinction, why?

IBM has been a "patent troll" for a long, long time. Heck, the term "ninja lawyer" was invented for their patent teams.

Most job postings I see are for a "Rockstar lawyer"

Generally patent trolling is claimed when a company has never used the patents themselves (a non-practicing entity). Here IBM and Sears, iirc, created Prodigy which was innovative technically on several fronts. They spent a lot of resources solving problems and they got patents on some of those solutions.

I think we risk legitimizing actual patent trolls by lumping them in with IBM's behavior in this case. That being said, I think the patent scheme is broken and "non-obvious" needs start meaning something again, not to mention that granting software (ed.) patents is so problematic.

SSO serves the same function as a credit rating or identity verification service has served for decades. I'd call that non-obvious (applying a concept in one domain to a new domain), even if it took some serious engineering to implement that functionality "on the internet". But I also haven't read the patent.

Another perspective on patents held by publicly traded companies is the perspective of the investors (admittedly an equally unpopular perspective). The person who invests in a company's stock knowing what IP that company holds has a legitimate interest in not letting those assets be devalued. With IBM, there's not a strong claim given that the licensing fees are rounding errors, but the principle is worth considering.

"Patent Troll: a company that obtains the rights to one or more patents in order to profit by means of licensing or litigation, rather than by producing its own goods or services."

While distasteful, this isn't patent trolling and it's not at all clear why you assert IBM is on its last legs.

IBM is one of if not still the largest filler for patents in the US. If not to litigate on those patents, what's the point.

IBM had a patent for images displayed on pages, which they accused every internet company of violating around 1999. They called it the “Technology Licensing Program”

This isn't an isolated incident or new news. It's standard IBM at this point, and the world deserves to know.

Two failing companies fighting in court. In the end, only the lawyers win.

IBM is hardly failing. They know how to litigate and have gotten far more money from litigation than it's cost them.

If nothing else cases like this scare other people into paying licencing fees. So, fighting wounded companies like Groupon can be very useful.

What’s your definition of failing?

https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/IBM#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsi...

My definition of "failing" certainly doesn't include companies that are still profitable, employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, have hardware in every Fortune 500 company's datacenter, and is the market leader in some high-growth fields.

Which high-growth fields is IBM a market leader in? In both AI and cloud computing, they are considered an also-ran.

I work in information security and IBM is the undisputed leader. I’d also hesitate to call them an also-ran in AI, even if they’re not the undisputed leader.

I feel like people on here discount IBM because they don’t have anything to offer consumers or startups, but the corporate world is far bigger and has far deeper pockets.

Thanks for reminding me how useful a site finance.yahoo is, if you take that graph back to 2005, IBM doesn't look that bad. You also see the precipitous fall Groupon had from its earliest days.

Consistently losing money without massive growth, or a ~50% and growing drop in both revenue and profits, or failing to diversify as their only revenue sources goes away.

PS: Notice how none of the above mention stock price, there is a reason for that.

> Desmarais told jurors IBM is a prolific innovator

And when this is no longer the case you let the lawyers do the innovating...

How could they patent SSO?

Or... How could they be trying to enforce a patent from the late 80's (if the article is correct)? Quite a lot of things don't add up here. I'd love to see some actual information here. Bloomberg's article has slightly more content: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-16/ibm-seeks... I'd really like to see what patents they are talking about, though...

Found the actual suit: https://www.b2ipreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Intern...

Edit again: That's a memorandum opinion, not the suit :-) But at least it lists the patents...

I won't bother to edit again. The SSO patent is here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

Filed in 2005 (on April Fool's day no less!) and published in 2006. It looks like the strongest of the 4 patents. The other ones look pretty weak to me. The first 2 (from 1989!!!) seem to be discussing displaying cached data on a monitor... I couldn't actually get much sense from it. The third one seems to be describing a cookie... But it's pretty darn general.

Not an expert in patents by any stretch of the imagination, though...

I remember sitting in on a meeting where an “enterprise” consultant was trying to sell the telecom I worked for at the time on a single sign on system that worked by wrapping intranet sites in a frame with a shared cookie.

He insisted on calling the cookie a secure token so it would seem different.

Asking price? $100k

Wouldn’t shock me if it was related.

Oh man.

[Enterprise PTSD intensifies]

Hmm, aside from the triviality, it sounds like they may also have patented pre-existing art in 2006 then..

I-Planet portal server can be traced back through Webtop to Pony Express.. It was one of several competitors in the late 1990s, and I think they all provided this style of SSO.

Only $100k? That is much, much less than a big ol' intrusive SiteMinder or BMC project. In fact, it's so cheap as to cast serious doubt on the consultant's credibility. And I am already assuming this happened about 15 years ago.

If it’s from the late 80’s, how is the patent still enforceable? 20 years right?

...from the date of issuance. They're called "submarine" patents when the applicant intentionally delays issuance to get more years of life out of them.

https://www.google.com/search?q=submarine+patents

arstechnica.com article "IBM sues Groupon over 1990s patents related to Prodigy" [1] from March, 2016 includes some more details and links to 4 patents:

- US5796967 Method for presenting applications in an interactive service https://patents.google.com/patent/US5796967

- US7072849 Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service

- US5961601 Preserving state information in a continuing conversation between a client and server networked via a stateless protocol

- US7631346 Method and system for a runtime user account creation operation within a single-sign-on process in a federated computing environment

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/ibm-sues-groupon...

Simple. IBM filed first.

Reminds me of the "online shopping cart" patent that was sueing all major e-retailers years ago. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crush...

The difference here, is IBM loves to license out their innovations. And I think that makes it easier (cheaper) for Facebook, Google, Amazon, to decide to pay the fee rather than battle in court.

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