IBM brings Amazon to heel in patent spat

IBM has buried the hatchet in its patent spat with Amazon in exchange for a wodge of cash and a cross license agreement. Big Blue kicked off the case last October, accusing the online warehouse of "willfully" violating IBM patents covering "such services as allowing users to order items from an electronic catalog and …

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised that they haven't tried to patent electrons

or have they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Insanity is a web patent

This is just another sign that patenting concepts for the behaviour of website systems is insane. This is a big boy in the school yard bullying another. Smaller e-commerce developers and retail sites, will they live in fear of Big Blue sending the men in black to shut them down? Na, we'll just get on with making good e-commerce websites. There's too many of us out there - they can't take us all down.

I run a UK e-commerce software company, so I’m wondering when we Europeans will turn our backs on the US market and instead look to the rest of Europe and the Far East for business were we are free of this patent of web concepts crap. Stuff ‘em.

[daniel]

And IBM vs Google?

OK, we all know what IBM stands for (In Business for Money), so when will they go and take on Google, Yahoo and Ebay for a fistfull of megabucks?

[William Donelson]

The racket of patents, clearly shown

I'll license my suspect patents to you, and you license yours to me, and the courts will think they're real.

WHAT A RACKET !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon couldnt contest it ..

... because if they won the case it would probably set pecedents that would invalidate thier "one click" patent scam.

IBM generally has behaved pretty reasonably as far as software patents are concerned -- especially considering the numer of patents they actually own. They seem to use thier patent portfolia more as a defense against the patent hucksters (like Amazon) than as a revenue stream.