Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is suing Discovery Communications (NASDAQ:DISCA) for violating four e-commerce patents that relate to search and recommendation technology. In March, Discovery Communications filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com over the Kindle. Discovery filed a lawsuit against Amazon.com at the U.S. District Court in Delaware because of a patent around an encyption system used for e-books.
Now that the two companies are suing each other over patents, it will most likely be settled and perhaps a partnership will come out of it. This is what happened between Microsoft and TomTom.
The problem with patents is that a lot of them are too general and they are overly abused. BusinessInsider pointed out that Apple has a patent on multi-touch mobile UI technology which the Palm Pre has as a feature. But Palm has a lot of patents and Apple may inadvertently be violating them.
It was a matter of time before all the general patents that Amazon made got them into some legal issues; it will be interesting to see how the court sides on this… expect this one to go to the supreme court.