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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."
My royalty payment is in an envelope, just behind my SUV.
Have gnu, will travel.
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."
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
Isn't the eighth circle of Hell reserved for that crap?
No, that would be for the dev teams of Windows ME and Vista.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)