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

[Eponymous Hero]

say hello to my leetle eenjunction!

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: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