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.

Re:Is this one in East Texas?

[Ethanol-fueled]

And yet, for some reason, all of you assholes still want to move here. Don't. There's no jobs, especially not high-tech ones. There's no scenery. The beaches don't even have waves like they do at the Atlantic. All that Hollywood shit is fake. We don't have good marijuana. All we have are ghettos and military bases, and who wants to live in a military state? Oh, and gays. California accepts the gays because it is a state nobody wants to move to. Everything is also really expensive and totally not worth it.

Nope, don't move here. I can't even escape to Arizona because California took my car as tax money.

I'll settle

[PPH]

My royalty payment is in an envelope, just behind my SUV.

Re:Hurray!

[V-similitude]

Except it's not really a software patent, is it? It's really just an idiotic patent, and looks like our system actually managed to catch it this time. So the summary really should read: "Idiot who filed idiotic patent can't handle rejection."

rejections appeals?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I tried that with the girls in high school -- it never worked.

Re:Hurray!

[icebike]

Suing without a patent in hand has got to be a pretty risky business model.

Rejected is rejected till its accepted. And its not going to be accepted. Prior art goes way back to CompuServe days, well before his 1995 filing.

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

[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.

No the summary and article are bad. This actually produced an issued patent, # 7,644,122 (which issued in 2010). But the patent is now under inter partes reexamination (# 95/001,411; you can look up that application number in Public PAIR), and that reexamination of the patent has resulted in all claims rejected. The right of appeal notice (it's not exactly a final rejection; inter partes reexamination works a little differently than ex parte prosecution) is under appeal to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. It may take awhile to get a decision though given the backlog at the Board.

When that is done, there is an appeal route to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. When the proceeding and all of the litigation is complete, the Office will issue a reexamination certificate, which would cancel all of the claims (if the rejections of record hold up).

Technically there's nothing stopping the patent owner from suing someone else in federal court, but such litigation would surely get stayed in light of the reexamination in the USPTO.

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?

Much better sources at Patently-O

[PatPending]

Political Candidates Sued for Patent Infringement

Complaint

P.S. And no it's not in East Texas; it's Central District California.

Re:Much better sources at Patently-O

[PatPending]

Here is the plaintiff's website.

Golly, I haven't seen a website using frameset/frame since 2000.

This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them.

Joking aside, there's this noteworthy paragraph from their February 21, 2012 news release:

According to EveryMD's attorney Frank Weyer, the timing of Facebook's IPO Prospectus could not have been better. "Earlier in the litigation, we had offered our patent to Facebook for a minimal fee, representing a one-time fee of less than $.02 per Facebook member at the time--an almost negligible amount given the vast sums of money that Facebook intends to make off its users," says Weyer. "Instead, Facebook rejected that offer and tried to overwhelm us with their team of high-priced attorneys. We are now pleased that Facebook did not take us up on our earlier offer. Thanks to Facebook's IPO prospectus, we realize our earlier offer was greatly undervalued. It will now take a substantially higher sum to resolve this ongoing patent dispute."

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.

Re:Hurray!

[khallow]

It seems more like this guy is fraking the system over to allow him the freedom to go out and make a difference. You know, if I had a way to pick the pockets of fat cats while giving me the time to spend volunteering in third world countries or doing explorative expeditions - I just might.

That's a rather ugly parasite, if true. I see it as doing a lot of harm in order to practice token charity. Isn't the eighth circle of Hell reserved for that crap?

Re:Hurray!

[indeterminator]

WE SOFTWARE NOT REAL MOST STUPID INNOVATION

A-ha! I found your secret code. I think you're trying to say we are some sort of software simulation...

Re:Hurray!

[Ihmhi]

Isn't the eighth circle of Hell reserved for that crap?

No, that would be for the dev teams of Windows ME and Vista.