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Facebook Ordered To Turn Over Source Code
consonant writes "A Delaware District Court judge has ordered Facebook to turn over ALL its source code to Leader Technologies, who allege patent infringements by Facebook. The patent in question appears to be for 'associating a piece of data with multiple categories.'
Additionally, while the judge in question deems it fine to let Leader Technologies look at Facebook's source (for a patent, no less!) in its entirety for a single feature, it would be 'overboard to ask a patent holder to disclose all of their products that practice any claim of the patent-in-suit.'"
Looks like all those "campaign contributions" had their intended effect.
Maybe one day someone will bribe our elected officials to do the right thing.
If we're getting to the point where people are winning cases because they've effectively patented a design pattern, then we're all in trouble.
I mean, "associating a piece of data with multiple categories" -- sounds like every relational database schema on the planet to me.
Anyone wanna take bets on how long until Leader Technologies comes out with their own social networking site that looks very similar to Facebook, and gets sued for having some technology that infringes on a Facebook patent?
But seriously, shouldn't the court be trying to determine infringement, rather than letting the plaintiff view every piece of code Facebook has written? That's almost like saying "Microsoft infringed on 'using a scroll bar'; let Red Hat view all of the source for Windows so Red Hat can make sure it's not infringing." - if Windows were the only product Microsoft had. It's a crazy statement to make. In industrial terms, it sounds even worse: "Caterpillar might be infringing on a patent for 'method of transporting hydraulic fluid'; give Mitsubishi all of their blueprints for every one of their products so they can make sure it's not infringing".
If you didn't catch it, did you notice the 'obviousness' factor in those examples? Associating data into multiple categories seems pretty obvious, as databases have been doing just that for a long time.
"associating a piece of data with multiple categories"?
Are you kidding me?! So when I create a database table that allows me associate a record with multiple categories I'm infringing on this patent? Surely this isn't the whole story... could someone smarter than me fill me in please?
I am going to go patent taking a wiz in the morning. Apparently prior art doesn't mean anything.
While I agree that Facebook is the first well implemented piece of social software of its niche, what is so novel about its design but its momentum?
Does it have anything to do with PHP? Hadoop?
Facebook could be implemented with standard DBMS like MySQL right?
try login when I can be bothered - once a week.
I think there are a few Open source social web networks:
http://mashable.com/2007/07/25/open-source-social-platforms/
I find the Frontpage annoying because originally I couldn't work out how to only display things from friends I choose, a whitelist rather than a blacklist. It's actually easy:
Make a list of friends that you want to see updates for and then on the homepage move it to the very top on the left menu. Unintuitive but it works.
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Are those multiple tags I see against the summary?
Source, now!
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
While we're on a reform kick in this country maybe we could undertake patent reform.
Excuse me, but isn't there a TON of prior art in this arena, for example, RDBMS and object oriented database systems have done this from the very beginning. What the heck is an RDBMS good for if you can't actually use or display associated objects?
ZOMG! It's being done on a community building site! We'd better patent it because it's a revolutionary concept!
It should fail litmus tests for patents on several grounds:
* Prior art
* Obvious to those skilled in the trade
* is pretty much the whole point of HTML and RDBMS in the first place
* is the whole point of SQL
* is the whole point of being able to test variables if strcmp(strInformation1,strInformation2) {then do something with the result}, etc.
That the patent office granted a patent for associating related data objects at this point is an epic fail underscoring the need for real patent reform.
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Did ANYONE even read the patent? I'm looking at the patent now, and while it's not rocket science, it's nowhere near as simple as "associating a piece of data with multiple categories". In fact, that quote is from the article, not the patent.
It's a software patent, and therfor, to all of us not living in the United States, laughable.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It's refreshing to see somebody at least try to read the patent. I have a hard time believing anybody could mis-interpret it this badly though. Let's look at part of claim 1:
How would an operating system with a shell qualify as a "network-based system"? Answer: since it's not network-based, it's not even close. Even something like logging in remotely isn't really network-based -- it's based on one computer, and happens to have a network between the CPU and the terminal. Here they seem to be talking about something that's truly network-based -- something intended exclusively (or at least primarily) for access over a network, and (quite possibly) the "server" isn't necessarily a single server, but itself an entire network. Exactly what "network-based" means for this patent doesn't seem entirely clear to me though -- and the patent specification doesn't really tell us either (the phrase "network-based" isn't mentioned in the specification). If that claim is part of the lawsuit, there will probably need to be a "Markman" hearing to decide how the claim should be construed. The court is required to presume that the patent is valid, and therefore attempt to construe the claims in a way that doesn't make prior art obvious -- and in this case, I think "network-based" is pretty easy to construe as meaning something that prevents a normal (or even remote) login from being prior art, so if the issue arises, there seems to be little question that the court would do so.
For those who've talked about tagging being an infringement, I'd note that "metadata tagging" is specifically mentioned in the "background of the invention" as being known related art. Likewise, those who've talked about a: "one to many relationship" (or various similar phrases), that's also mentioned in the background of the invention as already being known, not falling within the patent.
Now, I'm not going to try to argue that the patent is necessarily valid -- that's a question the court will probably need to address, and if Facebook's attorneys are doing their jobs, they'll (have specialists at prior art searching) put a fair amount of effort into researching reasonable possibilities of prior art. It does look, however, like if there is prior art, they probably really are going to have to do some serious work to find it. It might well exist -- quite a few people have been working on similar ideas around the same time, and it's entirely possible somebody else beat these guys to it. If it is out there, however, it's going to take quite a bit of hard, careful work to find it and show that it really does include all the limitations in the claims of the patent.
Just FWIW, I'd also note that to invalidate a patent, you don't just have to find prior art to one of the claims -- you have to find prior art for all the claims, or at least all the claims at suit. Looking at their dependent claims, we find things like:
I don't think Facebook provides all those, so they're probably not being sued over that claim, but for statuatory prior art to invalidate that claim,
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
That's an insane patent to have been granted. The fact that the patent holder is asserting that Facebook is infringing it without having seen their source code is extremely telling - the patent holder appears well aware that the patent (which should never have been granted) is so broad as to cover functionality rather than implementation and therefore anyone who appears to be doing what the patent covers is almost certainly infringing it.
It's as is the patent office granted someone a patent on cracking nuts as opposed to a specific nutcracker design, and the lucky patent holder would then be in a position to go after anyone selling shelled nuts on the grounds that they must have shelled them, ergo they must have violated their patent. Of course nuts, unlike software claims decribed in obfusctated legalese, are easy to understand. I'm 100% positive one could describe assigning a value to a variable in such a complex way, accounting for all possible implenentations, semantics, etc, etc, that some moron at the patent office would think it sounded like a highly technical and specific discovery and no-doubt patent worthy. I think I'll go apply for a patent of comments right now ("in the 42nd embodiment, a source code file, stored in EBDIC format on a USB storage device, embeds self-descriptive components, that will be automatically stripped by the FORmula TRANslation language lexical analyzer, ...").
Given how complex software is, and how difficult it is for lay people to understand it, and given that the patent office in granting things like this make it obvious that they do not have software experts examining these patents, it seems that the whole notion of software patents needs to be reexamined. They are really doing more harm than good, and the intent of patents to encourage innovation is being subverted rather than helped by software patents. The patent office doesn't seem to understand the process of software design/development at all.
The fact that the judge claimed that there is no "legal theory" to support the idea that the suing party should not have to give good examples of things that use the patent in question doesn't mean it's a bogus idea to deny the request.
Yeah, it does... Infringement is in the patent statutes, 35 USC. The judge has to follow those statutes, as enacted by Congress (otherwise he's an Activist Judge!!). For better or for worse, the statutes don't require that the patent holder use the patent in question. So, that's a perfectly cromulent reason to deny the request. It's equivalent to a defendant charged with grand theft auto demanding to see the driving record of the vehicle owner - there's no requirement that the owner ever drove the thing, and no legal theory can support a defense based on "well, he didn't drive his car, so I was free to steal it."
NO! In fact, the patent itself specifically cites a one-to-many relationship as already being known. The attempt at claiming coverage of a one-to-many appears to come only from the incompetent who wrote the summary.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
You know, I get really tired of seeing articles like this, reading the actual article, and being a bit pissed off that they "got me" with their stupid summary. You'd think I would have learned better by now but the sad part is that most of these sensational things are entirely believable. It's really kind of depressing.
On another note, who the hell writes these summaries? Do they just have really awful reading comprehension or does all the sensational shit just float to the top? I suppose it's a combination of those 2 things isn't it?
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
They first came for Facebook, and we marveled and pined endlessly over stupid patents.
Next they came for MySpace, and we cheered endlessly.
Finally, they came for Slashdot, and there was nobody else to care.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.