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."

Comments

Yahoo has been here since the dinosaurs

[Stan92057]

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.

Re:Yahoo has been here since the dinosaurs

[viperidaenz]

1) Buy existing patents noone knows/cares about
2) Sue competitors for infringment
3) ???
4) Profit!

The company with the most spare cash and best patent lawyers wins!

Preaching to the choir

[DigitalSorceress]

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.

Re:Preaching to the choir

[dudpixel]

Since when did that stop them granting a patent?

Re:Preaching to the choir

[Scarletdown]

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.

I am me, and I approve of this rant (because it is already modded up to the max, so I can't give it a +1 anything).

Re:Preaching to the choir

[Grayhand]

Darwinism needs to take over. Remove all government funding for law school tutition and the schools themselves except for those that agree to commit 10 or more years to civil service. Change the rules so if a lawsuit is declared frivolous then the party being sued can counter sue for 10X the amount sought. Regulate lawyers as in place a strict limit on the number of lawyers allowed to practice. We have more than the rest of the world put together so there are obviously too many. Limit lawyer fees to time and expenses plus 10%. Limit corporate lawsuits to actual losses plus legal fees. Limit the number of times some one can take the bar. Sorry but some take it for years and even in rare cases decades before they pass. I doubt they hang a sign on their wall that it took five tries to pass the bar. The point is to limit lawsuits and improve the quality of the lawyers that remain. Okay here are scary numbers. There were 1,143,358 lawyers in the US in 2007 but only 751,000 farmers in 2008. There are significantly more lawyers than farmers. Farmers contribute food. Lawyers contribute headaches.

Re:Preaching to the choir

[Lando]

I have worked with several companies over the years. The interactions I have had with patents have all been negative. Two companies I have worked with, basically start-ups, were put out of business by patents. One of the companies won their defense against the patent troll, but didn't have enough money to go back to court to get the injunction lifted. Patents may seem like a good idea, but it seems to me in actual practice that rarely will you have anyone that actually gets paid for having a patent, and most of the results ends up hurting everyone else. At least under copyright you have to specifically seek to copy someone elses work, with patents you are trying to avoid coming up with the same idea as someone else in the world and you can lose everything you work for over the course of many years just because someone else took an idea to the patent office.

Heck, even id had the algorithm they came up with patented by someone else and had to pay royalties and lets no even talk about Rhombus and the things they pulled. I think that we need to get rid of patents and come up with some other means of funding research rather than continue the current course where there are a few winners and everyone else loses.

Re:Preaching to the choir

[evilRhino]

I don't see what your solution has to do with genetic variability created by natural selection, since this is clearly an artificially generated scenario. Call it anything else you like, but don't call it Darwinism. Personally, I favor a social anarchists solution whereby monopolies granted by patents are not allowed because they cost more to society than the value they provide.

Try Sueville

[tomhath]

A great new game. It sends out updates all day long "Yahoo just sued Facebook"..."Facebook just sued Yahoo"..."Apple just sued itself"...

Let the games begin

[high_rolla]

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.

Re:Let the games begin

[viperidaenz]

I dont think you understand the point of what was said. If Apple lost a touch screen patent war and the iPhone 5 nolonger had a touch screen as a result, their customers would probably notice. They would also notice when all the iPhone 4S's were banned from import.

Re:fdfdsa

[Frosty Piss]

frosty piss!!

You called?

look at me lookatmeeeeee

[electron sponge]

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.

"Online giant"?

[SockPuppetOfTheWeek]

What, who said anything about Google?

Oh, Yahoo!. Yahoo! is hardly an "online giant". More like an online joke. A wanna-be.

And the patents are...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:And the patents are...

[Colonel Korn]

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?

According to Ars, several (possibly 8, not confirmed) of the patents were purchased by Facebook since Yahoo sued them.

Re:And the patents are...

[jholyhead]

Facebook only owned 56 parents at the end of 2011 - that's why they were such a tempting target for Yahoo - no real prospect of a big countersuit. They must have shit a brick when they heard Facebook had purchased 750 patents from IBM out of the blue.

Re:And the patents are...

[thejynxed]

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.

Sounds to me like every search function ever implemented in software. This is one of the vaguest, most obtuse descriptions for a patent I've ever read. Like another poster said, you can virtually pick and choose words to swap out like it's a frakking Madlib. At this point, Yahoo! could take that word for word, and add "on the internet", and get awarded a patent.

Almost no non-trivial patents

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Almost no non-trivial patents

[viperidaenz]

Yep, if a reasonably skilled person in the specific industry cannot understand the patent and create the described invention then the patent should be invalid.

Re:Almost no non-trivial patents

[Man On Pink Corner]

And at the same time if a reasonably skilled person in the specific industry is found to have duplicated the described invention without recourse to the patent, then the patent should be invalid.

Willful infringement should be the only way to lose a patent suit, in other words. Otherwise, yes, the patent does, indeed, cover something "obvious."

I hope this is a ugly one.

[Lumpy]

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.