A British intellectual property and technology commercialization company has sued Amazon.com, Netflix, Barnes & Noble, and Overstock.com, accusing them of infringing patents related to online user-tracking.
Filed in a U.S. federal court, BTG's lawsuit charges the companies use their user-tracking technology as part of their online marketing programs, and asks unspecified damages for past infringement and injunctions against using the technology in the future.
"Litigation is part and parcel of doing business in the [intellectual property] technology spectrum," BTG spokesman Andy Burrows told InfoWorld.com, adding that there was still plenty of room to "reach a commercial settlement."
This isn't the first time BTG has taken the litigation route regarding intellectual property. Early in 2003, they sued Microsoft and Apple over a patent tied to Web-enabled software update technologies.
BTG, InfoWorld said, seems typical of a number of emerging intellectual property concerns who derive the bulk of their income from licensing and royalty revenue, even if they didn't actually invent the technologies in question, as is the case with BTG's tracking patent, bought from Infonautics Corp. in 2002. BTG is believed to hold 3,500 patents in their portfolio good for about $90 million in 2003 revenue.
None of the four companies named in the new BTG litigation have commented yet, but BTG has said they have yet to hear back from them.
Intellectual property litigation in the high-tech sector has "become more important," according to Ovum Ltd. research director Gary Barnett, "because people have run out of new ideas and they have started looking at old ideas and how to exploit them."
