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On Monday, Chewy, Inc., an online retailer for pet products, filed a complaint in the Southern District of New York against International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) asking the court for a declaratory judgment of noninfringement for the patents-in-suit.
Chewy stated
that “while IBM has obtained thousands of patents over the past 20
years, it is widely accepted that IBM does not itself make or sell any
products or services covered by the vast majority of those patents.”
However, Chewy claimed that “as part of its licensing campaign, IBM has
accused numerous well-known web-based companies of infringing very early
Internet patents and demanded large sums in royalty payments to avoid
costly litigation … Many of those companies accused of infringement
refused to take licenses and were ultimately sued by IBM.”
Following
this purported pattern, IBM informed Chewy in July 2020 about its
purported infringement. Allegedly, the plaintiff’s operation of
Chewy.com infringed the patents-in-suit. However, Chewy argued that it
does not infringe any claims in the asserted patents and declined to
discuss “a ‘business resolution,” with IBM.
The patents-in-suit
included U. S. Patent Nos. 7,072,849 (the ’849 patent); 9,569,414 (the
’414 patent); 7,076,443 (the ’443 patent); and 6,704,034 (the ’034
patent); entitled respectively, “Method for Presenting Advertising in an
Interactive Service”; “Method, Framework, And Program Product For
Formatting And Serving Web Content”; “System And Technique For
Automatically Associating Related Advertisements To Individual Search
Results Items Of A Search Result Set”; “Method And Apparatus For
Providing Accessibility Through A Context Sensitive Magnifying Glass.”
Chewy
argued that its website cannot infringe, for example, claim 1 of the
’849 patent because “the website does not pre-fetch advertising objects
for future use,” while the claim in the patent requires “pre-fetching
advertising objects and storing at a store established at the reception
system in anticipation of display concurrently with the applications.”
Chewy
claimed that it does not infringe the ’414 patent because its website
“utilizes JavaScript objects and JavaScript functions that are fetched
via separate requests,” meanwhile the patented claim states “the step of
requesting a set of JavaScript objects and a set of JavaScript requests
in a single HTTP request.” Moreover, Chewy stated that it does not
infringe the ’443 patent because its website “does not associate any
advertisements based on the words in the selected search result item” as
described in the patent.
Lastly, Chewy asserted that it does
not infringe the ’034 patent because the patented claim states the step
of “‘magnifying presentation of the object based on the object type of
the object’ and the images on Chewy’s website are magnified based on a
data-zoom-id=’Zoomer’ attribute and not because they are images.”
Chewy
averred that it does not infringe IBM’s asserted patents, however, IBM
sent a letter to Chewy countering its claims, and requested a meeting
with Chewy. The parties continued to go back and forth arguing their
positions about the purported infringement and a desire or lack thereof
for the parties to meet before Chewy sought declaratory judgment from
the court.
Chewy claimed that IBM had asserted the patents
against other companies like “Amazon, Priceline, Expedia, Zillow,
Airbnb, and Groupon.” Consequently, Chewy proffered that it believes IBM
will sue it for the alleged infringement of the patents-in-suit, which
Chewy argued it does not infringe.
Chewy has sought declaratory
judgment of non-infringement of the patents-in-suit, an award for costs
and fees, and other relief. Chewy is represented by Greenberg Traurig,
LLP.
Source:lawstreetmedia.com
Author:KIRSTEN ERRICK
Editor:IPRdaily-Vapor