08.27.18
IBM Publicity Stunts Which Strive to Portray This Patent Bully as Generous, Playful and Fun
Ignore IBM’s puff pieces about coffee and delivery drones; look for what these distract from
Summary: IBM seems to be trying to distract from its campaigns of patent blackmail, which mirror Microsoft’s patent strategy and are accompanied by heavy lobbying for software patents (those that IBM and Microsoft use for blackmail)
IBM’s USPTO-granted patents continue to be a laughing stock. Many of these are software patents and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) throws away a lot of them.
IBM’s patents are being challenged because behind the scenes IBM has been blackmailing a lot of companies; this sometimes culminates in IBM lawsuits. In fact, patent lawsuits from IBM are rather commonplace this year — to the point where a few days ago Mac Asay wrote about IBM in relation to its patent thuggery (while pretending to be a FOSS friend it’s lobbying for software patents and threatens FOSS companies). Asay suggests that IBM refrains from this blackmail and instead tries to create something. New examples of IBM’s blackmail campaign emerged only days ago:
Technology multinational IBM has taken a licence to a patent at the centre of a dispute with a San Diego-based provider of security solutions in the internet of things (IoT).
ZitoVault, which had brought a patent infringement lawsuit at the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Dallas), announced the settlement on Tuesday, August 21.
The San Diego-based company sued IBM back in April this year, accusing it of infringing US patent number 6,484,257, which covers ZitoVault’s CryptoSale software. The patent covers systems and methods that “provide a scaleable way to maintain a number of cryptographic sessions”.
Also see “ZitoVault Licenses CryptoScale™ Patent to IBM”; this was done by threats and pressure — the same thing Microsoft has been doing to FOSS for about a decade, e.g. shaking down Android/Linux OEMs.
“We’re guessing that IBM hired some PR agencies to help distract from patent news about its awful behaviour.”The above barely received any press attention however (certainly no mainstream press coverage). As a matter of fact, for almost a whole week (until the very end of last week [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]), the coffee-drone marketing stunt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] remained afloat; it’s akin to the Watson “AI” stunt and the BBC covered this PR not once but several times. Is IBM paying for this PR? We don’t want to bore readers with IBM’s PR, but they try to frame a patent of theirs as an invention that’s a gift to humanity and dozens of mainstream media publications played along. These are in fact software patents (i.e. fake/bogus patents) combined with something trivial like carrying a drink to a person. Why is the USPTO granting such patents and corporate media celebrating rather than ridiculing? We’re guessing that IBM hired some PR agencies to help distract from patent news about its awful behaviour. It is a form of googlebombing. They once tried it on me and it backfired spectacularly. █
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