Yahoo Files Patent Infringement Suit Against Facebook

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article over at ZD Net: "As expected, Yahoo today filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook. The online giant is claiming the social networking giant infringes on 10 of its patents. Yahoo is hoping to secure some portion of Facebook's revenues moving forward. 'Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed,' a Yahoo spokesperson told AllThingsD. 'These technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court. We are confident that we will prevail.'"

Comments

I don't know whether to laugh or cry

[multiben]

The quantity of time and energy these guys spend suing each other is staggering. It is sad to see other parts of the world (Australia) following the US example in this field rather than learning from it.

Re:I don't know whether to laugh or cry

[olsmeister]

And during the golden age of technology, when computers ran faster than ever before and all the far flung corners of the world were connected and able to communicate instantaneously, the most lucrative profession a young geek could aspire to was ... lawyer.

Re:I don't know whether to laugh or cry

[IndustrialComplex]

He did. I sued him and won his business.

More obvious, trivial junk patents

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just more obvious trivial junk that should never have been given a patent in the first place.

Re:More obvious, trivial junk patents

[Man On Pink Corner]

Funny how 99.99% of all of the software and hardware you use every day was ineligible for patent protection or otherwise created without bothering with it. It's almost as if patents are just another economic racket associated with living in a lawyer-ridden society, or something.

Re:More obvious, trivial junk patents

[robbak]

Yahoo was never a search engine. The were one of the "hand made index" school. When that idea proved unworkable, they started adding other's real search engine results to their indexed entries.

Re:More obvious, trivial junk patents

[Samantha Wright]

Technically, from 2004 to 2009, Yahoo had its own results, which were actually pulled by a real crawler. Said crawler was originally a company they contracted from, Inktomi, but later bought. I remember this era brightly, because the results were so bad.

Re:More obvious, trivial junk patents

[LizardKing]

So that's why you made your own search engine prior to Yahoo implementing these technologies?

Yahoo! isn't a search engine. It was originally a hand edited directory of websites, and the true search engine was licensed (from AltaVista and Google amongst others). Their code was a horrendous mess of C modules running on many different hacked up versions of Apache and it crashed with shocking frequency. The only reason the site stayed up was because each Apache instance was largely autonomous and individual machines could be rebooted as necessary. The backend was no more stable, often running with the data in shared memory on FreeBSD machines that would also require regular rebooting since they were using crazy kernel configurations.

Amusingly, given their lack of project management processes, a few years ago they switched to PHP as their preferred development platform. I'm sure this has resulted in another clusterfuck.

yahoo started out as Jerry Yang's "Favorites"

[decora]

and im sorry but im guessing someone had a patent on 'selection of high quality linkage indicators in a computer network' if they looked hard enough.

if yahoo has anything, it is a right to join the corrupt backstabbing club of big tech giants who are all shaking each other down with lawyers playing the role of 'knee-cap breaker'. its very similar to how the mafia controls a neighborhood. each 'family' has 'turf' and 'agreements' to get cuts of various businesses. and they are always fighting amongst each other and threatening to wipe each other out.

meanwhile, ordinary people are just trying to build stuff, make a small profit, and live a normal life. not die with a mountain of cocaine piled on top of our desk.

Re:yahoo started out as Jerry Yang's "Favorites"

[SadButTrue]

Speak for yourself..

Re:yahoo started out as Jerry Yang's "Favorites"

[Eponymous Hero]

say hello to my leetle eenjunction!

Re:Troll-dam dam da

[ae1294]

Then why not sue years ago when they had more money? Yahoo! is circling the bowl. We all know it....

A Pattern

[the eric conspiracy]

Yahoo typically likes to bring suit at the time a large IPO is going on figuring that this is when a company is most likely to bend over rather than have a stain on the IPO.

They did the same thing to Google.

I'm glad that Facebook didn't knuckle under and is going to fight. Ideally the end result will be a financial loss to Yahoo.

The most popular degree is law

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have 1 in 3 students in the USA taking a major in law what did you think would happen ?

"Among those seeking a doctorate or professional degree, law was the No. 1 choice among men and women. There were nearly three times as many men and women becoming attorneys as there were earning a medical degree"
source

with all those lawyers itching to use their new found knowledge who are also in 6 digit debt to get their degree, and desperate does what desperate can, nothing clarifies the mind quite like a debt collector banging your door at 5am

well you end up with a society just like the one we see emerging, sue everybody for anything because you need to put food on your table AND pay the piper at the end of the month or he will take all you have.

so this Yahoo trial is just the tip of the iceberg, the best conclusion for any business is if you want to innovate, do it outside USA, do not sell/visit/talk to them, its safer that way.

Re:The most popular degree is law

[Anonymous Coward]

How horribly misleading and incorrect. So law was the most popular professional "doctoral" degree, big deal. It's not a "major", and it's not 1 in 3 students, it's 1 in 3 "doctoral" students (which is a tiny fraction of all US university education).

And it's made even more misleading by the fact that it's very difficult to get into (and requires a lot of effort and focus to graduate from) *any* medical school in the US (and if you graduate, you have to do another 3-6 years residency after which you have an almost certain chance of getting a decent job), while there are a ton of crappy law schools that accept even crappier applicants. And calling a JD a "doctorate" is kind of a joke (it's a 3 year program, the 3rd year of which is mostly spent looking for a job and getting ready to take the bar). Not to mention a lot of those new JDs can't find a job today anyway and/or never manage to pass a bar, and many others never intended to actually practice law in the first place.

Re:The most popular degree is law

[TheRaven64]

But since it's easier to fuck people for money

I don't think you need a law degree for that...

Please tag this kind of stories with following tag

[tenco]

popcorn

Re:The Difference is...

[Anonymous Coward]

The article has a link to the suit - the patents all sound fairly generic:

- Method and System for Optimal Placement of Advertisements on a Webpage [3 patents]
- System and Method to Determine the Validity of an Interaction on a Network
- Method and System for Customizing Views of Information Associated with a Social Network User
- Control for Enabling a User to Preview Display of Selected Content Based on Another User's Authorization Level
- Online Playback System with Community Bias
- Dynamic Page Generator
- World Modeling Using a Relationship Network with Communication Channels to Entities
- System and Method for Instant Messaging Using an E-mail Protocol

Re:The Difference is...

[Xtifr]

Post Bilski, that seems pretty improbable. Much as I may despise Facebook and don't care one way or the other about Yahoo, I'm not going to concede that anything involving pure software can ever qualify as the basis for a legitimate patent suit.

Plan for eliminating software patents

[Okian Warrior]

Suppose some entity puts all of their software patents into a pool. For the sake of argument, let's say Google and IBM get together and pool all of their software patents into a sort of "co-op". Anyone who is a member of the co-op gets to use any and all the patents in the pool, royalty free.

Then they open up membership in the co-op.

Anyone who wants can join the co-op, with the following requirements:
1) They donate their own software patents (if any) to the pool
2) They agree not to sue any other co-op member over a software patent

And the following benefits:
1) They can use any patent in the pool royalty free
2) They won't be sued by anyone else in the co-op

Here's the best part: you can be a member of the co-op even if you *don't* have patents to donate. Membership is open to anyone - engineers, lawyers, businessmen... anyone.

With the big players taking the lead (Google and IBM in our example), everyone can now charge more or pay less, based on whether the other party is a co-op member.

Engineer looking for a job? We offer higher salaries to members of the co-op.

Vendor looking to sell? We discount our rates for members of the co-op.

Everyone in the group could adjust their prices depending on whether the other party is a member. The price adjustment reflects the "cost of doing business" with a particular class of people. The same as charging higher health insurance rates for smokers, or higher car insurance rates to teenagers.

Mark Twain once wrote about a small group of riverboat captains who banded together in this way, and effectively forced everyone to join their union. Initially no outsider wanted to join, but the members all agreed *not* to work with anyone who was not also a member. Captains found it easier to join the union than turn down a work opportunity.

The co-op model would also help stifle vague and overreaching patents. If someone in the co-op is sued (by an outsider), the member can refer to similar patents from the co-op which cover the same idea. Since in theory two patents cannot cover the same idea, the member can claim that the usage falls more within the co-op description than the troll-patent description.

If people could do this and stick to their guns, we would eliminate software patents in a couple of years.

Re:Plan for eliminating software patents

[Baloroth]

First, I'm not 100% certain such a co-op would be legal in all cases, but aside from that it wouldn't matter in all the most important cases. See, the real patent trolls are those who don't even have a product, only a patent: the co-op is powerless against them, since they have no leverage (remember, the troll isn't using any patent or possible patent, he only "owns" them), while the troll can patent nearly anything, which means there will always be something the co-op members could get sued for (it just isn't possible for them to cover everything themselves).

So while a decent idea, in theory, I doubt very much it would actually work. It might prevent this suit, but really this suit isn't one of the really egregious cases anyways (except insofar as software patents are bullshit).

Plus, in the extreme opposite direction, Apple has far too much clout to be bowed by such a co-op, and I suspect there would be others who are too powerful as well (Microsoft, perhaps) and without the ability to force everyone to join, it won't ultimately be effective.

Links to the patents in the case

[million_monkeys]

Here are links to the 10 patents discussed in the case. I made it partway through one of them before I decided to go have a beer instead. Maybe someone else has more patience.

6,907,566 Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage
7,100,111 Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage
7,373,599 Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage
7,668,861 System and method to determine the validity of an interaction on a network
7,269,590 Method and system for customizing views of information associated with a social network user
7,599,935 Control for enabling a user to preview display of selected content based on another user's authorization level
7,454,509 Online playback system with community bias
5,983,227 Dynamic page generator
7,747,648 World modeling using a relationship network with communication channels to entities
7,406,501 System and method for instant messaging using an e-mail protocol

Re:Links to the patents in the case

[rgbrenner]

Those first 3 were from Yahoo's acquisition of Overture -- the company that invented the text ads that google uses. Overture was originally named GoTo.com, and was started in February 1998 -- 7 months before Google was founded.

So Yahoo may have a real case here.

Re:Company Lifecycle

[silentcoder]

Actually step 4 is wrong. What really happens is a few steps:

4) Go public
5) Discover that the people who now control your company have absolutely no incentive in it's long-term survival but every incentive to make their shares worth more next quarter.
6) Fire the founder and appoint a new CEO (unless the founder plays ball - 96% of them get fired).
7) Make a lot of moves that give massive short term profit boosts by effectively selling off the very assets that made your company a success in the first place - mass layoffs for example.
8) Report a record profit
9) Watch as all those share-holders sell their pricey stocks - the price now comes back down
10) Discover that without good staff you can't make good products. Stagnate while competition forges ahead.

Continue with your original step 5.