Twitter’s IPO will be taking place later on this week but now the microblogging company have got a potential legal battle on their hands in addition to worrying about entering the public space. IBM have accused Twitter of infringing on three of the company’s patents relating to advertising, contacts and “retrieval of uniform resource locators”.
The information concerning Twitter’s new patent problems, revealing in an amended SEC filing, indicates that Intel hasn’t taken matters to the courtroom just yet. Twitter has received a letter from IBM “inviting us to negotiate a business resolution of the allegations”, reports Ars Technica. Twitter believes that it has defences against IBM’s claims, according to the filing. but these are not specified. As a patent-holding company, Twitter is technically under-gunned with only nine patents at their disposal compared to the huge number held by IBM.
The timing of the letter from IBM is reminiscent of a situation Facebook was put into about the time of their IPO, where patent litigation by Yahoo was added to the social network’s IPO filing just prior to the IPO itself. Facebook also faced court after a suit regarding the Like button popped up just after the IPO concluded and neither seems to have done the company much harm to date.
Source: Ars Technica
