Candidates Sued By Patent Troll For Using Facebook

WrongSizeGlass writes "Ars is reporting that the 'inventor' of the concept of 'providing individual online presences for each of a plurality of members of a group of members,' claims that four million Facebook business account holders, including at least three major presidential candidates, are guilty of infringing his patent. He's suing Facebook for infringing on his patent as well as the three candidates. A Patent Office examiner rejected the patent claims, but the rejections have been appealed."

Comments

Is this one in East Texas?

[msobkow]

Now that East Texas has finally started rejecting patent troll claims, maybe Texas justice will take hold and they'll clean the gene pool a little by just SHOOTING idiots like this on their way out of court.

Everybody Just Calm Down

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody calm down. Even if this is appealed it will be struck down for the useless crap it is. The appeals process is normal, and the "inventor" has a very real financial incentive to appeal. But keep in mind the patent examiner has lready struck it down, so it's not an actionable patent yet, and will definitely never be.

Re:Everybody Just Calm Down

[whoever57]

Even if this is appealed it will be struck down for the useless crap it is.

He is hoping that it won't be struck down before Facebook's IPO and that Facebook might decide that it would be prudent to keep their IPO paperwork clean of pending patent litigation by paying him some money to go away (AKA "settling the case").

Nice IPO you have there, it would be a shame if you lost a few $B on the IPO because of a little lawsuit, wouldn't it?

Excellent!

[Citizen of Earth]

We need MORE patent trolls to beat up on the presidential candidates with completely bogus nonsense to help bring attention to the brokenness of the current system. Set up a WikiTrolls organization to sue every major politician.

Re:Hurray!

[MightyMartian]

SCO sued with a bunch of printouts and a complete inability to point out the offending code.

Re:YES!!!!!

[KermodeBear]

And this is a good way to get it fixed. Contact the candidates involved in the lawsuit. Encourage them to take the matter seriously and to look into the abuses of the patent system. Use Righthaven as an example of a Patent Troll.

We all know that a vast majority of our representation in the government is technologically ignorant. They probably don't know that this kind of stuff is a real and serious problem; they likely see this lawsuit as some crazy on-off event.

It's not. Contact these people. Make sure they understand.