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Facebook Countersues Yahoo Over 10 Patents
An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Facebook today filed its own patent infringement lawsuit against Yahoo. The social networking giant is claiming the online giant infringes on 10 of its patents. This is a countersuit and will likely lead to some sort of settlement between the two parties. Facebook says Yahoo is infringing on a wide range of its services, including its homepage, content optimization, relevance engine, Flickr photo-sharing service, and advertising throughout the service. Two months ago, Yahoo threatened Facebook with patent war. Last month, the online giant sued the social networking giant over 10 patents and the technology industry made sure to criticize Yahoo like never before."
Is Yahoo going SCO way?
The social network 2; who sued them now?!
I am Jacks complete lack of Windows
Yahoo has been here since the dinosaurs roamed the web i cant see how FB a relative noob business can out patent Yahoo. Yahoo has has personal profiles forever with ads plastered all over the place. Yahoo has had gaming and the list goes on. FB isnt even public yet "Nor should they be". Time will tell i guess.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I am so damned sick of world + dog patenting... welll, everything.
It's just ridiculous.
I KNOW there are patents out there for (software) things that are nontrivial .. things that are actually not obvious to any reasonably skilled practitioner of the software arts, but I'm sick to death of these "a method of derpa derp ta derpa derp involving a database to store derpaderp present derp a derp ta derpaderp"
I wish like hell we could just invalidate every software and business method patent and say "you did something special, FINE, copyright your code, but patents are going back to being about physical stuff" /rant
sorry, just annoyed like the rest of you.
The Digital Sorceress
A great new game. It sends out updates all day long "Yahoo just sued Facebook"..."Facebook just sued Yahoo"..."Apple just sued itself"...
Yahoo threatened war. I hope they counter counter sue and this blows up into something huge. Anything that puts more attention on just how silly these patents are becoming has to be a good thing. If FB loses on any of this and has to change their interface then it's millions of users will start to take notice.
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You called?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Yahoo danced and Facebook danced back, so now it's ON!
FB and Yahoo! are having love spats, and Y! is still on the market. FB could do with a really good newsfeed and an open imaging hosting solution as opposed to the inetrnal one which often often doesn't work if you are not logged in.
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I'll be very happy when corporate controlled social networking dies a natural death and there is an open-source, easily manageable solution for attention whores.
What, who said anything about Google?
Oh, Yahoo!. Yahoo! is hardly an "online giant". More like an online joke. A wanna-be.
Here are the 10 patents Facebook is suing Yahoo with
U.S. Patent No. 7,827,208 — “Generating a feed of stories personalized for members of a social network” – Filed on August 11, 2006, and granted November 2, 2010.
U.S. Patent No. 7,945,653 — “Tagging digital media” – Filed on October 11, 2006, and granted May 17, 2011.
U.S. Patent No. 6,288,717 — “Headline posting algorithm” – Filed on May 19, 1999, and granted September 11, 2001.
U.S. Patent No. 6,216,133 — “Method for enabling a user to fetch a specific information item from a set of information items, and a system for carrying out such a method” – Filed on May 30, 1996, and granted April 10, 2001.
U.S. Patent No. 6,411,949 — “Customizing database information for presentation with media selections” – Filed on August 12, 1999, and granted June 25, 2002.
U.S. Patent No. 6,236,978 — “ System and method for dynamic profiling of users in one-to-one applications” – Filed on November 14, 1997, and granted May 22, 2001.
U.S. Patent No. 7,603,331 — “ System and method for dynamic profiling of users in one-to-one applications and for validating user rules” – Filed on March 7, 2005, and granted October 13, 2009.
U.S. Patent No. 8,103,611 — “ Architectures, systems, apparatus, methods, and computer-readable medium for providing recommendations to users and applications using multidimensional data” – Filed on September 3, 2009, and granted January 24, 2012.
U.S. Patent No. 8,005,896 — “System for controlled distribution of user profiles over a network” – Filed on June 17, 2010, and granted August 23, 2011.
U.S. Patent No. 8,150,913 — “System for controlled distribution of user profiles over a network” – Filed on August 22, 2011, and granted April 3, 2012.
It's nice to see Facebook is able to reach back to 1996 for its patent protection, isn't it?
Nobody wants to give away their secret sauce recipe by explaining it in a patent that can be understood! That would be commercial suicide. Better to keep the secret and leave others to figure out how you did it.
So they patent mini tangential stuff in the most vague terms possible. I have yet to read a useful patent from the last decade. A 'this is how to make this thing' that somebody can use to make that thing. They're all just a pile of lawyer garbage at this point.
Yet another burden on business, yet another burden that can't be exported either.
Just checking if you were paying attention.
It seems a lot of this is patents being used not to foster innovation, but to trap X so Y can sue them
Instead of working around a patent, (there are so many, and they are so broad in scope, it's nearly pointless even to sit at a computer and even type 'Hello World' - somehow you'd break a patent).
Now what is happening is that there is innovation trying to happen in the US, but patents are being used to stamp down on something that could otherwise be doing good for your economy (generating jobs, etc). Kind of sad.
The only people this does really seem to benefit are patent lawyers. It's a win-win for them. Business in litigation must be booming (at the expense of other business).
So instead of the US fostering techinical innovation, you now have a big stick called 'software patents' to beat that back every time it tries to do something useful for the economy. It appears anyone can join in with a sufficiently broad patent. This is sad and should be 'fixed' as it is wasting a lot of peoples time.
but really...
... this like a battle of the stupidest trick. Each side is pulling out it's tricks and trying to beat the other with a trick more obvious than the last.
It needs to be very ugly and nasty. It needs to be the catalyst that starts patent reform to eliminate software patents.
It stifles creativity and progress.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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Careful, you just might get what you ask for and the copyright side is as bad or worse - the code would be locked up forever.
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Google,Facebook and other big sites are giving information to the people and earn income
# Returns anti-patents neccessary to keep business from suing each other for patent infringement.
def generate_antipatents():
patents = []
for business in all_businesses:
patents.append("Sue " + business + " for patent infringement.")
return patents
So Yahoo is suiing Facebook over 10 patents, and Facebook is suing Yahoo over 10 patents.
With any luck, this whole action will result in the invalidation of 20 nonsensical patents. Only, what, 10 million more to go?
Yes master?