Facebook Locks Down Social Gift Giving Patent 185
bizwriter writes "Facebook has been on a roll of late, nailing a number of patent grants that will help it retain dominance in social networking by creating barriers for competitors. Yesterday came patent number 7,970,657, 'Giving gifts and displaying assets in a social network environment'. Although it doesn't directly prevent other social networks from enabling gift giving among users, a clever legal and technical maneuver makes it far more difficult."
Maybe what we need is... (Score:4, Insightful)
.. one guy at the patent office to look at each patent for about five seconds, and stamp ones like this with "This is stupid, go away... NO PATENT FOR YOU!!"
Re:At first glance (Score:4, Insightful)
This. It should not be possible to get a patent for an idea that just surfaced. Patents should only be granted for months upon months of hard work, research, validation and such. And expire after a short time, say 5 years.
A patent for giving a gift, making a gesture or arranging a number of icons is just silly and killing the software industry. The patent office should void all such patents and since algorithms cannot be patented, no software patents should be allowed. At all.