IBM Convicts Zynga of Patent Infringement, Awards $44.9M in Damages

TapTechNews September 17th news, IBM successfully convinced the federal jury in Delaware that the mobile game maker Zynga under Take-Two had infringed its patent rights and needed to pay $44.9 million (TapTechNews note: currently about 319 million yuan).

On Friday local time, the jury ruled that Zynga's games, including its Farmville series, had misused the basic network technology and infringed two of IBM's patents related to web-based communication.

Zynga, on the other hand, denied IBM's accusations, arguing that these patents were invalid. Alan Lewis, a Zynga spokesman, said on Monday that the company was disappointed with the judgment but believed it would win on appeal; an IBM spokesman said he was satisfied with the outcome of the judgment.

In fact, IBM not only sued Zynga, but also filed lawsuits against other Internet companies in 2022 for related technology infringement, some of which involved the Internet service Prodigy in the late 1980s.

In March this year, IBM announced the termination of the related lawsuit against the pet food retailer Chewy, and then reached a settlement with the Japanese e-commerce website Rakuten Marketplace in June, with the amount not disclosed; another online marketplace, Groupon, had reached a settlement with IBNM in 2018 for $57 million.