Tech giant IBM has agreed to settle a patent lawsuit with mobile game maker Zynga after securing a $45m jury verdict earlier this year, Reuters reported, citing a filing in Delaware federal court in the US.
The two companies informed the Delaware federal court last week that they have reached a settlement in principle and requested a pause in the case to finalise the agreement.
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IBM sued Zynga in 2022, alleging that the latter infringed on patents related to “foundational” internet technology, initially developed for IBM’s late-1980s internet service Prodigy.
In its complaint, IBM described the patents as central to the online networking and advertising structure of the modern internet.
The company argued that while other major tech companies have licensed these patents, Zynga delayed discussions for nearly eight years.
In September, a Delaware jury found Zynga and its subsidiary Chartboost guilty of infringing two IBM patents related to web-based communications, including one from the Prodigy era of 1989.
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By GlobalDataThe jury awarded the company $44.9m in damages, citing Zynga games, including the “FarmVille” series, as infringing on the patents.
Zynga denied the company’s allegations, arguing that the patents were invalid.
IBM had also pursued similar lawsuits against other internet-based companies, including Chewy, Rakuten, and Groupon, over related technology.
The tech giant previously ended a related case against Chewy in March and settled with Rakuten in June for an undisclosed sum.
Groupon settled a similar lawsuit with IBM for $57m in 2018 after an $83m jury verdict in IBM’s favour.
The latest development comes after IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) expanded their partnership to scale the use of responsible generative artificial intelligence (genAI) for businesses.
This collaboration was unveiled during the AWS re:Invent conference, highlighting IBM’s strategy to leverage open-source technology and its ecosystem across diverse platforms, optimising its technology within AWS environments, specifically Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock.
IBM is introducing its Granite models, designed for business applications, on Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker JumpStart.
