Quick summary of the case: IBM sued Groupon last week claiming that Groupon had been infringing on 3 of its patents. According to IBM Groupon had built its entire business model around these patents and was asking that the court halt further infringement and pay damages.
I am going to further discuss one of the patent claims by breaking it down-
Patent 76,31,346: Method and system for a runtime user account creation operation within a single-sign-on process in a federated computing environment.
For example, it helps allow users to sign into Groupon using their Facebook account.
Claim 1
CLAIM
COMPONENT
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ANALYSIS
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A
method for managing user authentication within a distributed
data processing system, wherein a first system and a second system
interact within a federated computing environment and support single-sign-on operations
in order to provide access to protected resources, at least one of the first
system and the second system comprising a processor,
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So
this method pertains to interaction between two systems to enable user
authentication, which means that if there are more than or less than two this
claim would not hold. Also, it is to support a "single sign-on"
process to provide access to protected resources, which means that if the
access to the resource is unprotected/unrestricted then the defendant may
argue that this claim is invalid. Groupon can argue that its
resources are not "protected" because we can still view the deals
even if we haven't signed in.
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receiving
from the first system at the second system an identifier associated with the
user;
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This
means there has be a common link between the two systems, for example an
email/ user account.
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the
method comprising; triggering a single-sign-on operation on behalf of the
user in order to obtain access to a protected resource that is hosted by the
second system, wherein the second system requires a user account for
the user to complete the single-sign-on operation prior to providing access
to the protected resource;
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In
addition, the second system (the one from which we are going to facilitate the
single sign-on process) needs to have the user's account to complete this
process. This means that if the second system in question does not have a
database of users (for example, 4chan), this claim does not apply.
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and
creating a user account for the user at the second system based at least in
part on the received identifier associated with the user after triggering the
single-sign-on operation but before generating at the second system a
response for accessing the protected resource, wherein the created user
account supports single-sign-on operations between the first system and the
second system on behalf of the user.
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This
means that the second system will provide some information (even if partial)
that is enough to create a user account on the first system using this single
sign-on process. For example, Groupon requires the user's mailing address,
during checkout but does not require it for access to deals in the area. So,
logging in with Gmail will provide information like Name, Gender, Age, etc.
which is enough to create an account with Groupon.
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I am not well-versed with this technology, but this claim's obviousness is apparent and I can see why IBM believes that Groupon has infringed on this patent.
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