Amazon files countersuit against IBM

TechNewsWorld reports that IBM filed suit against Amazon in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in October, claiming the e-tail giant is using technology covered by five patents held by IBM. Amazon.com is firing back, denying it had stolen IBM technology and asserting that the patent claims are too broad to be taken seriously. Amazon is countersuing IBM for stealing its own patents. IBM contends that Amazon \'built its business\' on technology owned by IBM and is demanding royalties \'on the billions in revenue that Amazon has received.\' IBM claims to own patents for systems that fashion recommendations for customers based on past purchases, Web site navigation and data-storage technologies. SeattlePI.com reports that Amazon accused IBM of buying at least some of the patents \'from a now-defunct company for the apparent purpose of threatening other companies with litigation like this to extract licensing payments.\' It also filed its own infringement claims against IBM. Full TechNewsWorld report Full SeattlePI.com report

In other patent-related news, England\'s Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling that two software-related patents were invalid. Oil giant Halliburton\'s attempts to patent a software system for designing drill bits has failed. Out-Law.com says that the company has been in dispute in the US and Europe over the drill bit designing software, and won its US case. There it sued Smith International, a competitor also from Texas, for infringement of patents it held in the software system. A Texas court awarded Halliburton $41m in damages in the US case, but in the UK the High Court found that Halliburton\'s patents were poorly drafted and Smith won the case. Following that ruling, Smith and Halliburton came to a private settlement over the technology, but Halliburton went on with its appeal in relation to one of the two technologies at issue, a \'force balancing\' patent. Following the settlement, Smith did not take part in the appeal. In the US, the courts found that Smith had infringed the patents in its use of similar designing software and ordered that it remove certain functions from its software. Full Out-law.com report