BTG wins battle against US giant

BTG, the UK intellectual property and technology commercialisation and licensing company, took a step closer to winning its patent battle against a group of US internet giants earlier this week, after it signed a settlement with online film di

Last September, BTG filed a lawsuit in a US Federal Court against four companies – Amazon, Netflix, BarnesandNoble.com and Overstock.com – claiming they had infringed its patents on a technology tracking how internet users navigate from website to website.

Netflix has agreed to pay an undisclosed sum (believed to be millions of dollars) in return for a non-exclusive licence to the technology in question. The lawsuit against the other three US companies continues.

BTG acquired the Web tracking patents, which are registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office, in 2002 from US internet software development house Infonautics Corp.

BTG specialises in commercialising a portfolio of rights mainly in medical technology and the internet and telecommunications fields. BTG was behind the commercial development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanning technology.

Last week, Amazon settled a patent infringement case brought by US e-commerce software company Soverain, for $40m (&£22m).

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