July 20, 2011: SellerBird Inc (Plaintiff) has sued Groupon, Inc, Hungry Machine, Buywithme, Inc and Opentable, Inc. (Defendants) for patent infringement in the Virginia Eastern District Court. I could not locate the web address of the plaintiff; however, this site describes SellerBird as a company involved in facilitating online auctions and other e-commerce activities. The defendants are e-commerce sites that provide services based on "Group buying". These e-commerce websites connect merchants to consumers by offering goods and services at a discounted prices based on factors such as location, minimum number of consumers etc. If the pre-conditions for the transaction are not fulfilled, then the consumer’s card is not charged for any money.
The patents-in-suit are US 7,647,024 (the ‘024 patent), entitled “Method and system for improving client server transmission over fading channel with wireless location and authentication technology via electromagnetic radiation” and US 7,983,616 (the ‘616 patent), entitled “Method and system for improving client server transmission over fading channel with wireless location and authentication technology via electromagnetic radiation” The ‘024 patent was issued on January 12, 2010 and the ‘616 patent was issued on July 19, 2011. The ‘024 patent is related to improving client server transmission over fading channel with wireless location and authentication technology via electromagnetic radiation whereas the ‘616 patent discloses method and system for facilitating electronic communication of secure information. An analysis of the claims of both the patent reveals that these patents disclose methods for performing “group transaction” on websites based on factors such as location information and identifier of the consumer.
I have reproduced the claims from USPTO for the ‘024 patent and the ‘616 patent below. The ‘024 patent has two independent claims and no dependent claims whereas the ‘616 patent has 4 independent claims and 26 dependent claims.
Claim 1 of the ‘024 patent:
“A method for facilitating electronic communication of secure information, the method comprising: receiving a unique identifier corresponding to a client process; recognizing the unique identifier and establishing a secure communication channel with the client process based on the recognition of the unique identifier; receiving information from the client process, through the secure communication channel, wherein the information is related to an item transaction or a financial transaction; receiving location information of the client process; and using the location information of the client process to correlate the transaction to a group transaction wherein transaction parties belonging in the group transaction are provided with a group benefit.”
Claim 1 of the ‘616 patent:
“A method for facilitating electronic communication of secure information, the method comprising: receiving a unique identifier corresponding to a client terminal; recognizing the unique identifier and establishing a secure communication channel with the client terminal based on the recognition of the unique identifier; receiving information from the client terminal through the secure communication channel, wherein the information is related to an item transaction or a financial transaction; receiving location information of the client terminal; using the location information to correlate the client terminal to group transaction information wherein transaction parties belonging in a group transaction are provided with a price discount; and providing information pertaining to the group transaction, wherein receiving the unique identifier is through a wireless communication channel.”
Groupon has offered various patents for its services and deals.Its deals reaches out to all the people with its discounts and vouchers.
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