IBM (International Business Machines Corp) this week asked a US jury to rearward it $167 Million in a court case blaming Groupon Inc. (the e-commerce marketplace operator) of employing patented tech with no authorization. John Desmarais, the IBM lawyer, informed a jury in Delaware in federal court that Groupon breached copyrights defining that the foundational e-commerce tech had already been allotted to Facebook Inc., Amazon Inc., and Google for almost $20–50 Million for each firm.
“Most of the big firms have taken permit for these copyrights,” Desmarais claimed. “Groupon, on the other hand, failed to do this. The new firm on the block declines to take accountability for employing these inventions.”
- David Hadden, the Groupon lawyer, blamed that IBM was over-reading the scope of its copyrights and stating the possession of the Internet’s building blocks.
“A major question in this case for you is whether these copyrights cover the World Wide Web,” Hadden claimed in front of the jurors. “They do not and that is due to the fact that IBM did not discover the Internet.” An executive of IBM is anticipated to testify during the 2-week court case about licensing agreements with tech firms such as Google and Amazon, offering a rare glance into IBM’s attempts to obtain income from its big portfolio of patent.
On a related note, the New York-located firm spends heavily in R&D and has locked more U.S. copyrights in comparison to any other firm for the last 25 Years. IBM took legal action against Chicago-located Groupon in 2016, blaming breach of 4 patents. Almost 2 out of the 4 copyrights at issue associate to Prodigy (a precursor of the Internet from late 1980s) designed by IBM in association with others. These describe a system for showing advertisements as well as applications that lowers loads on the server.
