Amazon says IBM WebSphere infringes patents
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In a strongly worded rebuttal, Amazon.com on Thursday countersued IBM. The companies have charged each other with patent infringement.
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A little less than two months after IBM sued Amazon over patent infringement, the Web retailer has turned around and countersued Big Blue. Amazon says IBM misappropriated technology in order to enhance its own offerings.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM will publish its patent applications online to share their details with the world and, perhaps, reduce the flood of patent infringement lawsuits. IBM made the change in corporate policy public Tuesday after a two-month long research project this summer involving experts in law, academia, government and technology. The change in policy "is designed to foster integrity, a healthier environment for innovation, and mutual respect for intellectual property rights," IBM said in a statement. It encouraged others in "the patent community" to follow its example. IBM believes that if it is clear and up-front about what technology it is patenting, such disclosure should reduce the risk of patent disputes and lower the chance that its innovations will infringe the patents of others. In this era of technology innovations, the number of patent filings have swelled and government agencies, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, have trouble keeping up with applications. "Those systems now deal with growing numbers of questionable patent applications and patent lawsuits," IBM stated. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office makes filings public 18 months after they are submitted and offers only a two-month window for limited public comment on the patents, said IBM spokesman Ari Fishkind, at the technology company's headquarters in Armonk, New York. Under IBM's new policy, the company will establish a six-month window for public comments and encourage more active dialogue about the patents. This will put others on notice of what IBM is planning to patent, but also give other inventors the opportunity to tell IBM that they already hold a patent on what IBM proposes to patent, Fishkind said. "This is a way to get more people involved, like in an open source community," he said. The policy is intended to make IBM patent applicants responsible for the quality and clarity of their applications and to clearly establish ownership of the patent. IBM also contends that business methods that don't have particular technical merit should not be patentable. The patent policy was developed by a panel of about 50 experts working throughout May and June in a collaborative process conducted on an online wiki. A wiki is a Web site at which several people have the ability to write and edit a document online. "The intellectual property regime in this country is not functioning in the best interests of society and of innovators," said Steven Weber, a professor of international studies and political science at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the group that developed the policy. The volume of patent litigation has grown with the growth of new technology innovations and the tendency of courts to expand the definition of what can be patented, Weber said. There have also been instances in which companies have used vague patent language as leverage to sue others for patent infringement and reap millions in settlements. If the patent process is more open, the risk of litigation will be lower, which saves all parties money spent on litigating patent disputes. "Litigation is a dead weight loss" on everybody, Weber said.
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Peer-to-peer company accuses RIAA and its partners of infringing upon its patents.
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3M Co.  has filed suits against Sony Corp. , Lenovo Group Ltd.  and others, claiming infringement of lithium-ion battery-related patents, the diversified U.S. manufacturer said in a statement on its Web site.
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IBM filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Platform Solutions Inc. claiming PSI's systems allow IBM mainframe operating systems to run on Itanium-based hardware.
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(InfoWorld) - In another blow to peer-to-peer file sharing, a U.S. federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Morpheus software program encouraged users to infringe upon copyrighted works. StreamCast Networks, the owner of Morpheus, "cannot seriously argue that it did not know that the popular music and movies traded on its network were copyrighted," wrote U.S. district judge Stephen V. Wilson. The ruling is another win for record and film companies, which sought an injunction against distribution of the file-sharing software in the suit, filed in 2001. StreamCast continued to fight after two other companies named in the suit, Grokster and Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file-sharing client,Â reach settlementsÂ with the entertainment industry. StreamCast said it could consider appealing, saying the software has legal uses. "We do not believe that StreamCast encouraged users to infringe on copyrighted works, and the company never intended to do so," the company said in a statement. File-sharing software companies have been battered by a string of successful legal suits by the entertainment industry. In June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court found that both StreamCast andÂ Grokster could be held liableÂ for copyright infringements by users. Earlier this month, MetaMachine, which distributed the eDonkey client software,Â settled a copy infringement caseÂ with the record industry for $30 million. Just weeks prior, Sharman Networks agreed to pay $100 million to end outstanding lawsuits with the entertainment industry. Major record companies and movies studios have used aggressive legal tactics against illegal file sharing, suing both software companies and individual users, in an effort to halt falling revenues attributed to piracy.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. filed one joint and several separate lawsuits on Monday against companies and individuals accusing them variously of trying to defraud
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A lawsuit filed this week claims that Google, Yahoo, AOL, Amazon.com, Borders and IAC/InteractiveCorp violated a patent for an automatic message routing system held by Polaris IP.
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U.S. patent leader IBM said late on Monday it plans to donate 500 patents for free use by software developers, marking a major shift of intellectual property strategy for the world's top computer maker and a challenge to the high-tech industry.
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Google responded on Friday to a lawsuit filed against it by Northeastern University, denying claims that its search service infringes on patented technology.Google denied all charges in the suit, which was&#160;filed jointly by Northeastern, of Boston, and a search technology company called Jarg, of Waltham, Mass. Google also filed a counterclaim asking the court to dismiss the patent as invalid.The&#160;suit was filed in November&#160;in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks an injunction preventing Google from further infringement, as well as royalty payments and damages.The patent in question describes a distributed database system that breaks queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster search results.The plaintiffs say that Google uses this system to run its search engine, and that the system was invented by Kenneth Baclawski, an associate professor at Northeastern and one of Jarg&#39;s founders. Northeastern was awarded a patent for the system, which it has licensed exclusively to Jarg.In its response Friday, Google argued that the patent is invalid and should not have been awarded in the first place. It cites various sections of U.S. patent law, including those that deal with the novelty of an invention and prior art. It also cites the doctrine of &quot;laches,&quot; which essentially requires plaintiffs to file lawsuits in a timely manner.Its counterclaim asks the court to declare the patent invalid and unenforceable.Both parties have requested a jury trial, and legal experts have said the case could be resolved in 18 months to two years.The U.S. patent, number 5,694,593, is dated Dec. 2, 1997, and can be viewed by searching the Web site of the U.S. Patent &amp; Trademark Office. U.S. patent law is also described on the USPTO Web site in this PDF file. Google&#39;s reply cites sections 101, 102, 103, and 112.
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Passive-Aggressive behavior Network Appliance is suing Sun Microsystems in an intellectual property spat over - you guessed it - file systems.â¦
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Certicom, a vendor of encryption tools, has filed a lawsuit claiming that Sony's use of the AACS and DTCP content protection technologies infringes on two U.S. patents.
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Amazon.com, the world&#39;s largest online retailer, and Microsoft, the world&#39;s largest software developer, announced Tuesday the filing of several lawsuits against phishers and spammers.
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A drug manufacturer has been found to infringe patents licensed by the maker of a rival drug.
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Honeywell on Wednesday announced that it has filed suit in federal court against Apple Computer Inc. and more than thirty other companies, alleging infringement over a 1994 patent that describes technology
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U.S. patent leader IBM said late  on Monday it plans to donate 500 patents for free use by  software developers, marking a major shift of intellectual  property strategy for the world's top computer maker and a  challenge to the high-tech industry.