Court Issues Judgment Favoring JPMorgan on Web Transactions

Case Filed: Mar 07, 2012

Case Closed: May 19, 2014

Court: Delaware District Court

Judge: Sue L. Robinson

Case Summary:

Pi-Net International (Pi-Net), Menlo Park, California-based intellectual property firm, filed a lawsuit against banking and financial services holding company, JPMorgan (JPM) alleging patent infringement related to transactions initiated by members via their websites.

Patents-in-suit:

•      US5987500 entitled ‘Value-added network system for enabling real-time, bi-      directional transactions on a network,’ issued on Nov 16, 1999
•      US8037158 entitled ‘Multimedia transactional services,’ issued on Oct 11, 2011
•      US8108492 entitled ‘Web application network portal,’ issued on Jan 31, 2012

The patents were originally granted to Lakshmi Arunachalam and are currently assigned± to Pi-Net (source: MaxVal’s Assignment Database.) The ‘158 and ‘492 patents expire* by Aug 05, 2016 and the ‘500 patent expires* by Jun 20, 2017. The patents-in-suit generally claim a system and method for online transactions, wherein a user takes an action at the "front-end" that causes data to be routed through a system and used as a basis to execute a transaction at the "back-end," thereby completing a real time transaction.

As in complaint:

JPM provides online financial services via electronic means accessible through several websites, which include http://www.chase.com, http://www.jpmorgan.com and http://www.jpmorgansecurities.com. According to the complaint, JPM’s online banking systems practice the patented technology of a configurable value added network switch.  Pi-Net accuses six of the JPM’s online banking instrumentalities including Account Transfers, Payments, Customer Center, Account Activity (Business Card), Wire Transfers and Chase Mobile Application Quick Paysm. No specified damages were sought in the complaint.

Judgment:

After issuing its opinion, court granted JPM’s motion for summary judgment of non-infringement and invalidity of the patents-in-suit. Accordingly, judgment was rendered favoring JPM against Pi-Net.

About Pi-Net:

Pi-Net provides software products, services and solutions that enable distributed transaction processing over public and private networks. Pi-Net claims to hold patents on the technology allowing members to initiate transactions via credit union websites.

Other cases by Pi-Net:

Pi-Net has been active in the courts since 2012, lodging piles of patent infringement suits against various financial services providers, including Bank of America, Capital One, Wilmington Trust, UBS Financial Services and other consumer companies including Wal-Mart, Target and Staples.

See 1:12-cv-00282 for more details. To get alerts on cases filed/closed, subscribe to our Litigation Alerts.

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± MaxVal offers Patent Assignment Alert service where subscribers receive email alerts when assignments relating to target applications, patents or entities of interest are recorded.

* Expected expiration date. Patent Term Estimator is a free web-based tool that automatically calculates patent terms and expiration dates for U.S. utility patents.