It’s a double legal win for IBM

IBM has secured a pair of legal wins this week. The first win for IBM is when US Supreme Court declined to reinstate a $1.6 billion judgment previously awarded to BMC Software; while the second win is when the High Court in London, England, ruled in favor of Big Blue in a lawsuit against LzLabs, which was accused of misappropriating IBM's mainframe technology.

In 2017, BMC accused IBM of unfairly replacing BMC's software with its own on AT&T's mainframes. In 2022, a Texas court ordered IBM to pay BMC $1.6 billion for breach of contract.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, however, overturned that ruling last year, after discovering that AT&T independently chose to replace BMC's software with IBM's, and that the latter’s actions were permissible under the existing contract.

The legal battle concluded on Monday after the US Supreme Court refused to review BMC's appeal, effectively upholding the appellate court's decision in favor of IBM.

Meanwhile, in the UK, IBM won its legal battle against software startup LzLabs, owned by John Moores, the same person who founded BMC Software.

IBM had accused the Zurich-based software vendor of using a UK-based subsidiary to purchase an IBM mainframe in 2023 and reverse engineer part of it to further develop a software-defined mainframe (SDM) platform, allegedly in breach of its license agreement with IBM. LzLabs' SDM offering, launched in 2016, claimed to enable customers to run mainframe code on standard Linux servers and cloud platforms.

After a trial last year, High Court Judge Finola O'Farrell ruled in favour of IBM after determining that Winsopia, a UK-based subsidiary of LzLabs, had in fact violated Big Blue's terms of service. 

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