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.'"

Comments

this patenting thing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:this patenting thing ...

[91degrees]

That's not how it works. The description is just a description of what a patent is for. There can be a hundred different methods to associate a piece of data with multiple categories, and each one can be patented separately.

Now it may be that every single one of these is obvious and therefore non-patentable but you can't make that determination from the title.

Re:this patenting thing ...

[zoomshorts]

Back in the day, BBS's had all of this plus eBay's auction functions et al.
Prior art should invalidate most of this stuff. People who have adapted OLD
ideas to the "new" age , are just assholes. 90 percent of all this was done
on Bulletin boards before the internet became popular.

It is time for all of us old timers to bring this silly stuff to an end!
We saw or developed it before ANY of these newbies ever thought of it. Sned
your prior art to the patent office!!! Most of it was copyrighted before
many of these douchebags were born !!!

Re:this patenting thing ...

[noundi]

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.

You're right and that's exactly what everybody should encourage. Patent trolls are the best friends of those who dislike the patent system. I'll explain why. Nobody will care to reform a system which is quasi functional, but everybody, even lobbyists will push for reform on a system which is completely broken. If any Joe can sue the crap out of a major lobbying corporation for some silly patent you can be damn sure that the corporations will do anything to nullify this. And when the law is with Joe, the only thing left to do is to push for legislation change. So you see in a capitalistic world the absolute best way to make a change about anything is to show that the current structure is unprofitable for all major corporations. See it as "lobbying the lobbyists."

what?

[MickyTheIdiot]

"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.

Re:what?

[RawJoe]

"associating a piece of data with multiple categories" is simply how TFA summarized the patent. It's not that simple, patents rarely are. If you look at the patent in question, it has several claims that go into detail about the processes involved in their system. It's likely one of these processes that is the focal point.

Now, are these claims patentable? I don't know. there is a lot of long-windedness in patent claims, and it depends on how borad or narrow they are interpreted. Obviously the examiner found them to be narrow enough to be patentable. I doubt it's as simple as a one-to-many relation in a database, because even though examiners miss things, they really wouldn't have missed that. Maybe the judge will overturn it though, if he reads the patent more broadly.

Re:How about patent reform?

[MickyTheIdiot]

While we're on a reform kick in this country maybe we could undertake patent reform.

Think of all the corporate money that is being thrown at killing healthcare reform in all it's different guises...

and then multiply it by 200.

That, my friend, is the reason it isn't happening. Find ways to reduce the corporate influence and money in these fights first and then there is a chance.

Re:Patent infringement x 2!

[owlnation]

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?

It really doesn't matter if they do develop a social network site or not. There's been dozens of Myspace and Facebook clones out there. None have particularly succeeded. The underlying tech isn't what drives their success. It's the ability of their Marketing Droids to convince people that the emperor is really not, in fact, stark naked.

Laughable

[FreeUser]

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.

Re:Patent infringement x 2!

[TheKidWho]

The only reason facebook was initially popular was because it was for college students only. Once they allowed anyone to have a facebook page, it became the crap fest it is now.

Interestingly enough, if the government created a database like facebook to track citizens, people would be outraged, but make it voluntary and it becomes the next new thing.

Get rid of software patents

[SpinyNorman]

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.

Re:Well...

[webheaded]

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?

Re:American "Justice"

[Danse]

Absolutely! The laws serve no other purpose than to allow multinational corporations to bully... uhh... other... multinational corporations?

No, it allows more established corporations (and patent trolls) with large patent portfolios to prevent competition from young upstarts. Megacorps don't often go after other megacorps because it would end up as mutually assured destruction. They just cross-license their portfolios.