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Facebook Sued By Rembrandt IP For Two Patent Violations
An anonymous reader writes "Ars is reporting that the patent-holding company, along with the heirs of Dutch programmer, Joannes Jozef Everardus Van Der Meer (deceased 2004), have filed suit against Facebook for violating two patents relating to social media web sites. The two patents in question were filed for back in 1998, a full four years before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg first entered university at Harvard. Among the claims made in the lawsuit is that Facebook's "Like" button violates one of Van Der Meer's patents. Facebook even cited one of Van Der Meer's patents in one of their own filings later on. The suit seeks unspecified damages."
Please. I hate Facebook as much as the next guy, but this is just ridiculous.
I patented the process to think.
Near as I can tell, very few people are actually violating your patent.
"The way the patent laws work, and have worked for 200 years, is that when someone else uses it—whether intentionally or unintentionally—they owe a reasonable royalty," said Melsheimer. "It's not necessarily a function of bad intent or malicious planning. The notion that the original inventor didn't succeed in commercializing the invention is, legally speaking, not relevant.""
Patents are absolute monopolies which allow any and all royalty rates ... reason doesn't enter into it.
Simple... If Facebook has the guts to do it. Turn all of Facebook off. That's right, just a blank page to Facebook.com and make all FB powered comments show one thing :
Do that worldwide.
Facebook will lose a day's revenue, and my-oh-my, will that get everyeone's attention. And before someone asserts that they're just protecting their IP... um... no. Not only do "copyright holding" companies fly against the very face of the very spirit of copyright protection -- that is to give innovators of a concept and creation to profit from that creation -- these guys don't invent anything, don't produce anything, don't contribute anything to society. It's the copyright equivalent of cybersquatting.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
The more you think about it, the more it costs you...
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Can someone explain why it's reasonable to have patents and copyrights continue to exist after the original author is dead?
I really never understood that.
I think patent should only cover ideas that are implemented. Under the current system, if you patent some ideas that cannot be implemented now, you essentially stop people in the future from implementing them, until your patent expires. This stifles innovation.
No, it is unspecified because they left the award amount up to the court. It happens on every suit I have seen. "We ask for relief as the court deems equitable."
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
"The way the patent laws work, and have worked for 200 years, is that when someone else uses it—whether intentionally or unintentionally—they owe a reasonable royalty," said Melsheimer. "It's not necessarily a function of bad intent or malicious planning. The notion that the original inventor didn't succeed in commercializing the invention is, legally speaking, not relevant.""
Patents are absolute monopolies which allow any and all royalty rates ... reason doesn't enter into it.
Not so. Patents are absolute monopolies that can be used either for injunctive relief, which allows no royalties by definition because the infringer is no longer allowed to continue infringing; or for monetary damages, which allows a "reasonable royalty". In other words, you can either get 0 royalties and have an absolute monopoly, or you can get a reasonable royalty and no monopoly. You simply cannot have "any and all royalty rates," like 100% of revenue or infinite dollars per unit or whatnot. Check out 35 USC 284.
Thankfully, we are now a first-to-file system, so we don't have to bother with pesky details like prior art dating back to the dawn of civilization.
I refuse to take the credit; mine was a snarky reply to the actual best patent comment ever - the one which succintly makes it clear to anyone that in this age of fab-less production and freedom of information, patents are just stupid and almost completely stifle real progress, whilst feeding the fatcats (shareholders) who own and gamble on this world - unless it's *their* innovation, of course!
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Ugh. For a site supposedly full of intelligent people, please can we stop repeating this nonsense? Two parties invent something, party A just before party B. Under first-to-invent, if party B files the patent, they can go through all of the expense of filing and then party A can come along and say 'actually, here's my lab record which shows that we invented that first, we'll take that patent.' Under first-to-file, party A can come along and say 'actually, here's my lab record which shows that we invented that first. It's prior art, so we'll invalidate that patent'. The latter is the only sane way of implementing a patent system, because if two people invent the same thing at approximately the same time then there is no social benefit to giving either of them a patent. It doesn't mean that you can patent things that have existing prior art: that's a completely orthogonal bug in your patent system.
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