‘Jedi Technologies’ Accuses Ashley Madison of Copying Its Chatroom Tech

Jedi Technologies Inc., a small Arizona-based corporation, has taken legal action against the owner of Ashley Madison over the alleged use of patented chatroom technology.

Accusing Ruby Life in an Illinois court, Jedi claims that portfolio brands including Ashley Madison and Cougar Life have infringed chat “improvements” developed elsewhere.

Jedi owns a number of patents relating to social technology, many of which are listed on Justia here. 

The most recent, filed in November 2018, concerns “a method and system for using predetermined preferences/characteristics to ascertain personal compatibility between network or chat room participants based upon profile information.” 

The company, which runs the dating website ‘Match Machine’, has challenged a number of industry services on similar grounds in the past, often with little success. 

A 2016 case against Spark Networks was dismissed in Delaware, for example. It claimed that Spark infringed four different patents. Further litigation against Zoosk can be found here. 

Jedi also challenged Speeddate.com (later Mixr, Inc.) in a 2011 filing. This was dismissed by Arizona courts. 

In August, Ruby Life recovered an infringing web domain after an arbitration and mediation panel at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ruled against the owner of (the deliberately misspelt) ‘ashlaymadison.com’. 

Read more here.