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.'"

Comments

Re:where and order by

[Zordak]

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.

Re:The real funny meat of the article!

[Zordak]

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.