Yahoo Files Patent Infringement Suit Against Facebook 121
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article over at ZD Net: "As expected, Yahoo today filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook. The online giant is claiming the social networking giant infringes on 10 of its patents. Yahoo is hoping to secure some portion of Facebook's revenues moving forward. 'Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed,' a Yahoo spokesperson told AllThingsD. 'These technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court. We are confident that we will prevail.'"
A Pattern (Score:4, Informative)
Yahoo typically likes to bring suit at the time a large IPO is going on figuring that this is when a company is most likely to bend over rather than have a stain on the IPO.
They did the same thing to Google.
I'm glad that Facebook didn't knuckle under and is going to fight. Ideally the end result will be a financial loss to Yahoo.
Re:More obvious, trivial junk patents (Score:4, Informative)
Yahoo was never a search engine. The were one of the "hand made index" school. When that idea proved unworkable, they started adding other's real search engine results to their indexed entries.
Re:More obvious, trivial junk patents (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The most popular degree is law (Score:5, Informative)
How horribly misleading and incorrect. So law was the most popular professional "doctoral" degree, big deal. It's not a "major", and it's not 1 in 3 students, it's 1 in 3 "doctoral" students (which is a tiny fraction of all US university education).
And it's made even more misleading by the fact that it's very difficult to get into (and requires a lot of effort and focus to graduate from) *any* medical school in the US (and if you graduate, you have to do another 3-6 years residency after which you have an almost certain chance of getting a decent job), while there are a ton of crappy law schools that accept even crappier applicants. And calling a JD a "doctorate" is kind of a joke (it's a 3 year program, the 3rd year of which is mostly spent looking for a job and getting ready to take the bar). Not to mention a lot of those new JDs can't find a job today anyway and/or never manage to pass a bar, and many others never intended to actually practice law in the first place.
Re:The Difference is... (Score:4, Informative)
The article has a link to the suit - the patents all sound fairly generic:
- Method and System for Optimal Placement of Advertisements on a Webpage [3 patents]
- System and Method to Determine the Validity of an Interaction on a Network
- Method and System for Customizing Views of Information Associated with a Social Network User
- Control for Enabling a User to Preview Display of Selected Content Based on Another User's Authorization Level
- Online Playback System with Community Bias
- Dynamic Page Generator
- World Modeling Using a Relationship Network with Communication Channels to Entities
- System and Method for Instant Messaging Using an E-mail Protocol
Links to the patents in the case (Score:5, Informative)
Here are links to the 10 patents discussed in the case. I made it partway through one of them before I decided to go have a beer instead. Maybe someone else has more patience.
6,907,566 [patents.com] Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage
7,100,111 [patents.com] Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage
7,373,599 [patents.com] Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage
7,668,861 [patents.com] System and method to determine the validity of an interaction on a network
7,269,590 [patents.com] Method and system for customizing views of information associated with a social network user
7,599,935 [patents.com] Control for enabling a user to preview display of selected content based on another user's authorization level
7,454,509 [patents.com] Online playback system with community bias
5,983,227 [patents.com] Dynamic page generator
7,747,648 [patents.com] World modeling using a relationship network with communication channels to entities
7,406,501 [patents.com] System and method for instant messaging using an e-mail protocol
Re:Links to the patents in the case (Score:5, Informative)
Those first 3 were from Yahoo's acquisition of Overture -- the company that invented the text ads that google uses. Overture was originally named GoTo.com, and was started in February 1998 -- 7 months before Google was founded.
So Yahoo may have a real case here.