Roughly two months after Amazon was sued by Discovery Communications for patent infringement related to Kindle Amazon is suing Discovery Communications back also for patent infringement. In this case patents in question are related to “search engine and recommendataion technology” used on Discovery’s e-commerce website.
My guess is that legally both comanies are in the wrong but not because they are criminal but because current US patent system is not appropriate for modern intellectual property. Things like double-click get patented left and right. For the most part it’s done to protect against patent predators. So when somebody sues you over a bougus patent you are likely to find some other patent to sue them back for. Usually it ends up with undisclosed out-of-court settlement.
Most likely this will be the case here are well. We’ll see.
Original story can be found at Wall Street Journal.