Zim is the latest boxship company caught in the sights of an alleged patent troll, while two of its competitors have returned fire in their legal battles.
Transcend Shipping Systems sued the New York-listed, Israel-based containership operator on 30 March, accusing it of infringing five of its patents related to its container tracking system.
"The Transcend patents each include numerous claims defining distinct inventions," read the complaint, filed in the US federal court for the Eastern District of Texas.
Zim is the sixth containership company sued by Florida-registered Transcend after AP Moller-Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Mediterranean Shipping Co (MSC), Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) and CMA CGM.
In all six, Transcend said it owns patents covering a system that allows customers to track the location of a container and conditions using a global positioning system and memory device mounted on the container. One of the patents describes a system for sending alerts.
In all cases, Transcend seeks treble damages for the infringement.
Its case against Maersk was dropped in January for undisclosed reasons.
Hapag-Lloyd, Zim and OOCL have yet to file answers to Transcend's complaints.
CMA CGM and MSC filed responses and counterclaims this month. Both companies — represented by attorneys from Fish & Richardson — said the patents were invalid as they did not meet the threshold for patentability, which requires an idea to be new, non-obvious and concrete.
CMA CGM and MSC said the patents failed to describe their systems, although they did not elaborate on how.
Transcend's patents were initially issued to New York area businessman and attorney Raymond Joao, who transferred them to the company, where he is now a manager.
Joao spent much of the early 2000s suing banks, credit-card companies, brokerages and financial software providers over similar claims of patent infringement.
Win some, lose some ...
Then, he claimed that his company, Joao Bock Transaction Systems, owned patents for a system allowing customers to monitor and deny transactions through a computer.
He settled some of the cases and lost others, with judges invalidating the patents in some instances.
In 2013, Online Resources Corp called Joao a "patent troll" in a lawsuit seeking to prevent him from suing a subsidiary after the company came to an earlier settlement precluding further legal actions.
Patent trolls, or non-practising entities, threaten litigation over patents that they hold but do not use to make a product.
Zim declined to comment as it had not been served.
Attorneys for Transcend did not return a request for comment.
