Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Patents the News Feed
daedae writes "It seems Facebook has been granted a patent for the news feed, as a method of monitoring activities, storing them in a database, and displaying an appropriate set of activities to an appropriate set of users. 'That sounds pretty broad, and the social-networking world was all atwitter at the possible ramifications. Writing for ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick proclaimed, "This could be very big. ... MySpace, Flickr, Yahoo, Twitter (?), the sharing part of Google Reader, and even Google Buzz — do all of these sites have technology at the center of their social experiences that falls under this new patent of Facebook's?" The patent may not be that broad. Nick O'Neill at the All Facebook blog wrote that the patent doesn't appear to cover status updates as used by Twitter. "It appears that this patent surrounds implicit actions. This means status updates, which is what Twitter is based on, are not part of this patent. ... Instead, this is about stories about the actions of a user's friends. While still significant, the implications for competing social networks may be less substantial," O'Neill wrote.'"
To be precise, you can publish as much as you like once the patent application has been handed in at the patent office. You don't have to wait until the patent is granted, which could be years later
Twitter doesn't do anything like this. It just gives you a flat view from the people you follow, and lets you manually search using hand-entered search terms.
The cake is a pie
Where does Buzz or Twitter automatically generate news items based on the activities of other users and include a link so that you can also participate in those activities?
Not used Buzz yet I see...
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1069-google-buzz-5-things-you-need-to-know/
Maybe no so much for Twitter, but Buzz can generate "news items" form a variety of your other google services, and allow others to see and comment upon them.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You can't patent something that has already been published or is out in the open. The Facebook news is well known so this means one of two things:
1) This is a patent that was filed years ago, before facebook launched the feed. In the years since the filing, facebook has probably developed their feed away from the original proposal in the patent
The patent was filed August 11, 2006. Facebook opened itself to the public on Sept 26, 2006, although it was open to college students prior to that. If Facebook didn't add this feature until the Sept 26, 2006 relaunch, then the application pre-dates the public use, and the patent isn't removing something from the public domain.
Additionally, under 35 USC 102(b), you actually have an entire year to use your invention before you have to file. It's a grace period. So they could have implemented the feature at any point up to August 11, 2005.
Can someone turn that into English?
No, not really. That's kind of the point. Claim language has very specific meaning, both within the field of patent law, and within the patent itself. You can't just summarize a claim and say, "well, that's the gist of it," because every single word has an effect on the scope of the claim. If this patent is ever litigated, the parties will spend months and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars fighting over the definitions of "social network environment, " "news item," and "link." The entire case can hinge on the definition of a single word, and I have seen courts hand down some surprising (and vexing) claim constructions.
So basically, any advice you get from Slashdot armchair lawyers on what these claims "really mean" isn't worth the electrons it's printed on.
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As a minimum Google Buzz and Twitter strike me as clearly violating this patent.
Really? I bill tens of hours carefully picking over the specification, the claims, the prosecution history, and the prior art before I ever give my clients an opinion like that, and I never use the word "clearly." "Likely" is about the strongest commitment you'll get, because you don't really know until you've taken the thing to trial and exhausted your appeals.
The problem comes when they sell this to some patent troll who uses it to try to shut down the next big thing that comes along.
Why would they do that if it's as valuable as you think it is?
Even if we can't knock some sense into the patent office and expect them to find every existing example, we can extract a pound of flesh from those that apply for patents already in common usage, by imposing mind numbingly sever financial penalties for failing to mention and dispose of existing art in common usage at the time of application.
Patent applicants and their attorneys are already required to disclose to the patent office any relevant prior art that they're aware of (look up "inequitable conduct"). The penalty for failing to do so is a void patent. If a patentee intentionally held back prior art and then sued a competitor on the bad patent, the trial court could very easily award stiff sanctions. There is absolutely no incentive for holding back known art. Patent attorneys are paranoid about this. If anything, we err far on the side of disclosing stuff that's only marginally relevant rather than be found to have held back prior art. I myself have withdrawn (on the client's instructions) applications that had already been allowed so that we could submit art that we weren't even sure was relevant.
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