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Facebook to Boston Phoenix: You call that a patent? We'll show you a patent!
By adamg on Tue, 11/09/2010 - 9:53am
Last fall, the Phoenix sued Facebook, alleging the social network violated patents owned by a Phoenix subsidiary for creating user profiles online. Facebook yesterday returned the favor, suing the Phoenix for alleged violations of patents it owns on equally fundamental parts of the Web.
In its lawsuit, like the Phoenix suit, filed in US District Court in Boston, Facebook charges search engines on the Phoenix Web site that let uses find bands, events and restaurants violate a Facebook patent on a technique for letting users narrow the results of a search query. Facebook also charges its patent is violated by a Phoenix search engine that lets users specify exactly what sort of sex acts they want to see in X-rated videos catalogued by the Phoenix's adult sites.
But wait, there's more: Facebook also says a music player on Phoenix subsidary WFNX's site and real chat on the Phoenix's Love Access site violate another Facebook patent on real-time database updates, such as would be needed for compiling most-popular songlists and online chatting.
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Comments
Fundamental fix, already!
More of this meshugaas? Patents are the children of sluts of the legal system. Anyone claiming a patent seems to get it, no matter how illogical.
It's well past time for the USPTO to get its act together, including going back over the past 50 years and jerking frivolous patents that lack substance. The current system just begs lawyers to manufacture silly suits.
What's next — a use patent for a two-handed method of bringing a thick sandwich to the mouth, or a patent for a cylindrical hot-beverage container with a sealed bottom, open top and crescent handle on the side?
Rabblerabblerabble
Uh, I'm pretty sure there have been plenty of patents on thermoses (in fact, Thermos is a brand trademark that's been genericized). Also, I'm pretty sure prior art would cover how to eat a sandwich. So, one is already a patent and the other wouldn't get a patent. The system works!
Look, if you or I invent something, shouldn't we get the right to make money off of it for a while before everyone else gets to? In exchange, we tell the world just how we did it, so others can start working on the next big invention that takes us another step forward. It's a system that works!
This case isn't an example of patent abuse. I'm sure both Facebook and Phoenix have invented useful ways of improving web searching, profile storage, and cross-referencing. In the process, they each probably stepped on each others' toes a bit too. It's exactly one of the reasons why we have courts: to hash the particulars out when both people are inventing in the same closed-in space. System: works.
I mean, if you want to rail on companies patenting genes (although that's about to go away pretty soon), then go ahead. Patents shouldn't be given out for every discovery...just every invention.
Not so "works"
That's a cute, simplistic theory, but it really doesn't work all too often. The willy-nilly granting is the problem, not the market-forces type of argument. The outrageous suits and countersuits far too often show that the PTO does not differentiate between invention/innovation and ipse dixit claims of originality.
They need greater professionalism and more demanding standards.
This is true
The PTO needs better triage. If they dumped 90% of what came in the door as soon as it got there, it would reduce the current on-going assumption that you can just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. If it sticks, then you can use that stick to beat someone with when they come close enough to your claims. Low investment, high reward.
I still say the suit/countersuit is an important method of hashing out where the boundaries lie between similar patents (especially in the situation of software where "reduction to practice" isn't, and should be, interpreted as "show me your source code" in the patent). Wouldn't that be an interesting turn of affairs? You could still have inventions where the software is the reduction to practice that has to be opened up...and it would be the company's decision whether to GAIN the defensive position of having a patent for their invention while LOSING the ability to hide behind compiled code to prevent others from learning their method. OR they could GAIN secrecy by keeping their code closed, but LOSE the protection of a patent by holding only copyright to their particular method while others attempt to engineer new solutions on top of their intellectual space.
Just loosened....
...or proposed loosening the standards regarding the obviousness requirement. Which will allow more patents to be granted faster (and generate more fees faster for the PTO).
This is unfortunately another
This is unfortunately another example in an interminably long list that proves that intellectual patent law is completely broken and needs to be reformed to the point of revocation.
Facebook and Phoenix didn't "invent" anything any more so than Tom Clancy "invented" something when he wrote "Hunt for Red October." This is the crux of the problem with software patent law - a misunderstanding of the concepts involved in software. You don't "invent" things in software, you "write" things in software. And that misunderstanding has created a broken system that severely harms innovation and rewards companies that have never created anything, but simply submitted patents on ideas then waited for someone else to do the work, fall into their trap, so they can claim the reward.
Fortunately countries such as AUS and India have realized this and have moved away from, or never implemented software patents. We're working to widen this enlightenment.
Of course copyright has issues as well, in the United States, brought about by such things as the Bono legislation (like I said, all of intellectual property law needs reform), but one problem per post. :-)
Mindich vs. Zuckerberg
or "Battle of the Network Scumbags"