As IPO approaches, Twitter faces new lawsuit

In the coming days, the popular social network Twitter will no doubt be making headlines as it prepares for its IPO. According to the New York Times, the company may be worth as much as $13.9 billion and may sell individual shares for at least $25—higher than what was originally expected.

In short, there's been a lot of good news for Twitter. But that was recently eclipsed by a letter from IBM, alleging that the company has infringed on at least three U.S. patents.

TechCrunch reports that the patents cover "efficient retrieval of uniform resource locators," a "method for presenting advertising in an interactive service" and "programmatic discovery of common contacts."

IBM is reportedly interested in settling with Twitter, but the company may be preparing for an extended court battle. In a S-1 filing, Twitter wrote that it has an adequate defense prepared against IBM, though it could not guarantee that it would be successful.

"Many companies in these industries, including many of our competitors, have substantially larger patent and intellectual property portfolios than we do, which could make us a target for litigation as we may not be able to assert counterclaims against parties that sue us for patent, or other intellectual property infringement," Twitter wrote. "In addition, various 'non-practicing entities' that own patents and other intellectual property rights often attempt to aggressively assert claims in order to extract value from technology companies."

Given the work that must go into an IPO, this is not a great time to face a patent lawsuit. Companies in the position of protecting their intellectual property should work with a Phoenix business attorney to avoid such situations.

Categorised in: Intellectual Property Law

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