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."

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: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: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.

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.