August 14, 2012 – Central District of California Magistrate Judge John McDermott granted Richard A. Williamson’s [NPE] (Williamson) motion to compel defendant IBM to produce “outbound licenses and cross-licenses incorporated into, or used in or with, the Accused Technology (web conferencing).”  Plaintiff Williamson cited five  Georgia-Pacific factors related to determining royalty rates.  IBM cited two cases in defense of its argument against the motion (Lucent Technologies, Inc. v. Gateway, Inc., 580 F.3d 1301 [Fed. Cir. 2009]) and (ResQNet v. Lansa, Inc., 594 F.3d 860 [Fed. Cir. 2010]), but the judge observed that “these decisions did not concern discoverability, only admissibility of evidence at trial,” which carry different evidentiary standards.  “Thus, [the defendant's] assertion that cross-license and outbound agreements involve different technologies and markedly different structures from the hypothetical license relevant here does not preclude discovery even if those agreements are inadmissible at trial.”  Williamson has filed suit against AT&T, Blackboard, Citrix, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Verizon and several others over technologies related to web conferencing.  The patent-in-suit (6,155,840) generally relates to remote education.  8/3, Central District of California, assigned to Judge A. Howard Matz and referred to Magistrate Judge John E. McDermott, 2:2011cv02409.