Groupon fires patent suit at IBM

IBM has been taken to court by online marketplace Groupon over claimed patent violation.

Groupon filed a counter claim on Monday in a court in Chicago after IBM accused Groupon of patent infringement in an earlier, separate suit. The online marketplace is reported to have targeted IBM’s WebSphere Commerce platform. Its claim rests on the e-commerce middleware’s ability to send messages to customers incorporating GPS data and based on a user’s location via social media such as Facebook. IBM in March filed suit with a court in DelAware claiming Groupon HAD violated patents its engineers had worked on during the 1990s on internet service Prodigy. ®