VS
On March 2, 2016, IBM sued Groupon for infringing on four of its patents, which included two that emerged from Prodigy, the online service launched by IBM and partners ahead of the World Wide Web. According to IBM's complaint, Groupon has built its business model on its patents. They claim that despite their repeated attempts to negotiate, Groupon refuses to take a license, but continues to use its property. IBM is asking the court to order Groupon to halt further infringement and pay the damages.
IBM alleges that websites under Groupon’s control and its mobile applications use the technology claimed by the patents-in-suit for online local commerce marketplaces to connect merchants to consumers by offering goods and services at a discount. I will further discuss the patents below:
- US Patents No. 5,796,967 and 7,072,849: Its inventors developed new methods for presenting applications and advertisements in an interactive service that would take advantage of the computing power of each user’s PC and reduce demand on host servers.
- US Patent No. 5,961,601: It was developed to find a better way of preserving state information in Internet communications, such as between an online merchant and a customer.
- US Patent No. 7,631,346: It was developed for a single-sign on process in a federated computer environment, which would, for example, allow users to sign into Groupon using their Facebook account. One of the claims from this patent is as follow:
- Claim 3: ...sending a message from the second system to the first system to pull authentication information for the user from the first system to the second system in order to trigger the single-sign-on operation for the user at the second system
- As mentioned above, we can logically connect this to the "Connect with Facebook" or "Sign-in with Google" option available on most websites today. It simplifies our registration process by drawing information from a source/website that already holds the necessary information. I think this can be made possible because most registration processes require similar information (eg. Name, Birthday, Zipcode). As we have seen, we might have to add further information (like Address).
I found the last one to be particularly interesting (hence, I delved more into one of the claims): So, since almost every website uses this feature would every website have licensed it from IBM? Or would they have developed a slightly different way of integrating it? I don't think every website is licensing it (or IBM would be suing everyone left right and center given the right financial motivation). Rather, I think IBM decided to sue Groupon on this patent to add to the infringement of other more 'important' patents. What do you think?
Hi Srushti,
ReplyDeleteI wrote about this case too! I actually had the same question about this case as you did, which is why IBM chose to pursue a case against Groupon when there are many other companies that use this technology without licensing from IBM. It might be possible that other companies have tweaked their technology a little bit so that it does not infringe upon IBM's patent.
Nice post Srushti. I plan on writing about this case as well, but I'm glad I read your post first. Perhaps IBM is suing Groupon because Groupon is a huge company and they want to set a precedent. When Groupon first came out, it was the fastest growing company of all time. Since then, it has slowed down--kind of a bummer IBM is going after them honestly.
ReplyDeleteHi Srushti,
ReplyDeleteI really liked that you included the patent numbers. I agree that the last one sounds a little off. "So, since almost every website uses this feature would every website have licensed it from IBM? " Part of me thinks that IBM is specifically going after Groupon. Nice job explaining everything!