Fight over behavioral targeting (or hypertargeting, or whatever else you fancy naming it) is getting ugly. It has just emerged that ad network ValueClick has sued Tacoda (owned by Time Warner) for allegedly infringing two of ValueClick’s patents on behavioral targeting platforms – only a couple days after announcing the launch of their new predictive behavioral targeting platform.
Wendy Davis of MediaPost reports that “In the lawsuit, quietly filed two weeks ago in federal court in Los Angeles, ValueClick alleges that Tacoda’s core business–profiling users based on their Web activity and serving them targeted ads–infringes on two patents dating back to the 1990s.”
“We feel that we have a patent on the general principles of behavioral targeting, and that’s what we’re enforcing,” said Scott Barlow, vice president and general counsel at ValueClick.
Tacoda is not the first to be sued for those patents*: Blue Lithium and Revenue Science were dragged in court over them too, and both reached settlements with ValueClick. Will Tacoda follow example, or is there more to the game than yet another settlement?
Read the MediaPost story here.
*
“Method and Apparatus for Determining Behavioral Profile of a Computer User” (1998)
“Computer Program Apparatus for Determining Behavioral Profile of a Computer User” (1999).
