Yahoo Unfriends Facebook With Aggressive Patent Demands

theodp writes "'Hate to see something happen to that multi-billion IPO of yours,' is essentially the IPO-threatening message Yahoo sent to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook investors on the eve of the social networking giant's IPO. Yahoo, unlike the Sopranos, is using IP as its muscle to collect its IPO-protection money: 'We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement [for 10-20 Yahoo-owned patents] or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights,' Yahoo explained in a statement alerting the NY Times to its demand. Yahoo issued a similar last-minute threat to Google on the eve of its 2004 IPO, prompting Google to pony up 2.7 million shares to settle Yahoo's patent lawsuit. BTW, should Facebook also be concerned that Amazon has been beefing up its PlanetAll social networking patents from the '90s, including the one issued Tuesday covering a Social Networking System Capable of Notifying Users of Profile Updates Made by Their Contacts?"

Comments

Who should I hate?

[MickyTheIdiot]

Hmmm... I don't like Yahoo or Facebook.

I think I'll hate the patents themselves. Another ridiculous patent suit wasting the time and money of the courts.

Why Choose?

[Greyfox]

People often act like there's only one choice in situations like this. Don't you have enough hate in your heart for both? Here, let me show you how it's done:

I for one hope they destroy each other in an all out mutual-assured-destruction patent war. Then all die of anal warts. I realize that anal warts are not usually life threatening, but we can dream!

See? That wasn't so hard, was it?

I have a dream....

[Nyder]

... that one day congress/senate will come to their senses and invalidate all software patents, so I can laugh at the money these companies spend on each other over threats of court.

In other words, the only winners here are the lawyers, which makes the current laws scum laws.

Laws written by ex-lawyers that really only benefit lawyers. That is what is really going on.

Re:I have a dream....

[TheReaperD]

Protection for innovative software is a good thing. That's why it's protected by copyright, just like books and any other documents. Software is not a solid object and thus shouldn't be protected by patents. Though there are issues with current copyright law as well, it is the correct category for software protection.

Holy Submarine Patent, Batman!

[Qzukk]

Amazon's social networking patent was filed in 2011 but

This application is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 12/506,115, filed Jul. 20, 2009 now U.S. Pat. No. 8,041,595, which is a division of U.S. application Ser. No. 12/127,495, filed May 27, 2008 now U.S. Pat. No. 7,739,139, which is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 11/022,089, filed Dec. 22, 2004 now U.S. Pat. No. 7,386,464, which is a division of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/780,486, filed Feb. 17, 2004 (now U.S. Pat. No. 7,194,419), which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/348,355, filed Jul. 7, 1999 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,916), which is a continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 08/962,997, filed Nov. 2, 1997 (now U.S. Pat. No. 6,269,369).

That patent filed back in 1997 was for a networked personal contact manager. Good luck finding prior art!

Re:Clash of the Titans

[Anne_Nonymous]

Note to reality TV producers: Hillman is onto something here.

Your Hatred, It FEEDS ME or "Pub/Sub Flub"

[eldavojohn]

I think I'll hate the patents themselves. Another ridiculous patent suit wasting the time and money of the courts.

Here, let me help you hate.

Take, just for a quick example, Patent 5133075 (filed in 1988 granted on July 21, 1992) that is cited from the Amazon patent mentioned at the end of the summary (filed in 2011 granted on February 28, 2012). As a lowly software developer, Patent 5133075 reads like a now commonly used pub/sub paradigm. It's basically the opposite of polling. Where, for the longest time, the bulk of software projects would continually ask a central authority (like a database) for updates. So every five seconds you say "Do you have anything new for me yet? No? Okay, I'm asking again in five seconds" ad infinitum. Now, with one client, this is probably not a big problem. But as your number of clients increases this becomes impossible (usually on the network end of things, you DDOS yourself). So the idea becomes for that central authority to allow clients to register somewhere these updates should be shipped and whenever anything changes or something new comes in, you simply send it to everyone who's subscribed to that. It's a publish and subscribe method and we call it pub/sub. Undergrad (probably high school now) concept.

So with that in mind, Amazon's patent in the summary reads with this final sentence: "The system may also automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts." Oh, okay, so you took a now commonly used paradigm and applied it to social networking. Congratulations. Surely Twitter and Facebook were doing this before 2011 but what idiot allows a company to include any language like this in a patent? That's not an invention, it's not even really a derivative of an old invention. It's taking an old solution and applying it the same way we've been using it for almost twenty years. And now this new piece of shit is dated February 2012 and we have to deal with this unadulterated human feces for another twenty years? *head explode*

The Lifecycle of a Tech Company

[Cid Highwind]

Startup > Rising Star > Established Player > Unstoppable Juggernaut > Clueless Dinosaur > Patent Troll > "Hey, remember Unisys? Whatever happened to them?"

Welcome to phase VI, Yahoo! See you at the bankruptcy liquidation auction.