

Facebook Patents The Feed - dmpayton
http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/02/facebook-feed-patent/

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abstractbill
Software patents really need to die now.

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mkramlich
agreed. it's pretty clear to me now that basically if any reasonably
intelligent engineer, with a reasonable understanding of what tools/patterns
are available to him in devising a solution, sits down and devices what seems
to him to be a pretty obvious solution, that, according to the USPTO, it's
very likely patentable. So it becomes a race to see who is the first person
(who are we kidding here: large company) to reach the USPTO with the right
paperwork. Little guys lose. Mind-blowingly dumb.

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pbiggar
Lets be fair here. Any US company worth anything needs to protect itself from
patent aggression, whether from competitors or from patent trolls. Its the
cost of doing business in America, and the only way to lose is to not play.

We should reserve the 'facebook are fuckers' comments until they try to
enforce this (non-defensively).

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raquo
> the only way to lose is to not play

I think you meant the only way to win is to play. There are always _many_ ways
to lose!

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cduan
Brief look at the claims suggests to me that this patent probably won't cover
Twitter, or much else for that matter. It looks like it has two pretty severe
limitations: (1) there has to be a link to an online activity that feed
readers can participate in, and (2) the feed must be limited to certain users
prior to the feed's existence.

Here is Claim 1 (all the other claims look to be similar):

 _> 1\. A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment,
the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of activities in a social
network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database;
generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities,
wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more
viewing users wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one
or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another
user;_

It is a news feed about user activities. So far, nothing looks so interesting.

 _> attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another
user to at least one of the plurality of news items_

Ok, the news items in the feed have links. But...

 _> where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity
as the another user;_

So this is interesting. This means that it has to be an online activity
(otherwise how can a link "enable" you to participate in the activity?).

 _> limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users;_

So the news feed cannot be public. Although Facebook might try to argue that
this covers situations where the feed is sometimes private and sometimes
public, it seems likely that this element would be read to require limiting
all the time. If Facebook intended the opposite, then it should have said
something like "determining whether to limit access." (Alternately, it might
mean that the damages for the patent would be cut off by the fraction of feeds
that were private.)

 _> and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news
items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users._

And you display the news feed to some of the users. That word "predetermined"
is interesting--it suggests that the viewing users have to be chosen before
the feed is made.

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wooster
Ahem: <http://twitter.com/kellan/status/9651902873>

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evgen
This will definitely be a patent for some enterprising soul to dive into and
check the breadth of the claims being made. There is a ton of prior art out
there related to this, so unless the claims are relatively narrow I can see
this becoming another "let's break this patent" poster-child.

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basugasubaku
This looks to be the first patent granted to Facebook.

From the references in the patent, there are many more in the pipeline:

U.S. Appl. No. 11/639,655, Mark Zuckerberg, Systems and Methods for Social
Mapping, filed Dec. 14, 2006. cited by other .

U.S. Appl. No. 11/646,206, Aaron Sittig, Systems and Methods for Generating a
Social Timeline, filed Dec. 26, 2006. cited by other .

U.S. Appl. No. 11/493,291, Mark Zuckerberg, Systems and Methods for
Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary, filed Jul. 25, 2006. cited by other
.

U.S. Appl. No. 11/701,698, Jed Stremel, System and Method for Digital File
Distribution, Feb. 2, 2007. cited by other .

U.S. Appl. No. 11/713,455, Jed Stremel, Systems and Methods for Automatically
Locating Web-Based Social Network Members, filed Feb. 28, 2007. cited by other
.

U.S. Appl. No. 11/701,566, Jed Stremel, System and Method for Automatic
Population of a Contact File with Contact Content and Expression, filed Feb.
2, 2007. cited by other .

U.S. Appl. No. 11/502,757, Andrew Bosworth, Systems and Methods for Generating
Dynamic Relationship-Based Content Personalized for Members of a Web-Based
Social Network, filed Aug. 11, 2006. cited by other .

[...]

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mkramlich
Here's the template version:

U.S. Appl. No. <somenumber>, <some guys>, System and Method for Doing This
Really Pretty Obvious Solution To Some Problem That Thousands of Engineers
Have Been & Would Otherise Continue To Be Independently Devising In Isolation
For Quite Some Time Now Thanks, <date>. cited by <whatever> .

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noonespecial
I'm thinking its about time we dispense with the pretext of the patent
altogether.

Big companies just give a bunch of money to the government and a union/cabal
of elite lawyers. Later, if someone else comes up with a business plan that
threatens their profits, they can just ask the government to put them out of
business.

Whoever's put the most money in wins. Its like a giant ebay auction, but for
the whole market.

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statictype
So they basically patented the "rip off what twitter/flickr are doing"
business model?

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Mongoose
Good timing. I need a patent to study and write a quick report on for an IP
class I'm taking. This will do nicely.

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mkramlich
Sorry, I've already patented a "System and Method of Reading Websites To Come
Up With Ideas On What Patent To Study and Write a Quick Report On for An IP
Class One Might Be Taking"

my license rates are reasonable

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megaduck
But are they non-discriminatory?

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mkramlich
I have patents on both discriminatory and non-discriminatory licensing rates.
I also have a patent on patents, and patent offices. I have also patented all
thought and communication. Resistance is futile. All your base are belong to
us.

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barredo
"Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network" — Well,
we're doomed. Doooooomed.

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txt
Hehe, this is getting ridiculous...Wasn't friendfeed.com created before
facebook? Even if it wasn't (or was) there is no way this could hold up.

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pbiggar
I'm pretty sure Facebook bought friendfeed. I'm not sure exactly how patents
work, but it seems this would mean you couldn't cite friendfeed as prior art.

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mkramlich
Don't worry, the USPTO doesn't know how patents work either.

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cookiecaper
Uh, lol. Facebook didn't invent the idea of aggregation, it just made it easy
to aggregate your friends' photos and quips, mostly by virtue of getting a lot
of people to use it, even people up to a few generations older than the people
that usually used this kind of stuff.

Facebook didn't invent anything. The whole point of it is that it's an "RSS
feed of friends' lives".

Why are people such retards? This kind of stuff makes me angry and I have a
hard time dealing with it.

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cellis
Don't get angry, get a patent! That's probably the rationale Facebook is using
with regards to IP rights ("We don't like the idea of patents, but we dislike
even _more_ the possibility of a patent troll extorting us for something that
_should_ be obvious, so lets act preemptively and file for a patent").

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ZeroGravitas
Defensive patents don't stop trolls. That's the whole point of trolls (or Non-
Practising Entities), you can't counter-sue or cross-licence, you either pay
lots of money to win the court case or you pay lots of money to the troll.

