

Patent for idea of online user communities may bite Facebook - grellas
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202447370383

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defen
If Facebook actually gets shut down because of this, I could see that being a
good way to get some meaningful patent reform in the U.S.

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jcl
Agreed, especially since it's something normal people can easily relate to.
But, barring a public relations stunt by Facebook, I suppose this is going to
be quietly settled like the RIM patent suit mentioned in the article (another
promising, highly visible suit, since an injunction against RIM had the
potential to kill all the Blackberries on Capitol Hill).

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daleharvey
I hope these insane patents continue to surface, patent trolls seem to be
shooting themselves in the foot.

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euroclydon
When the government decides Facebook is "Too Big to be Patent Trolled" I think
some of the little guys who got eaten alive by business process patents might
just fly their airplanes into the patent office or court building!

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lutorm
If anything, shouldn't they fly their airplane into the ones who sued them?
Getting angry at the patent office by the time they got their head on straight
seems the wrong target at the wrong time.

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sili
Does their patent actually include an implementation of their idea? Prior art
notwithstanding, it strikes me that if you want to profit from your idea but
don't want to be bothered with pesky things like implementation and marketing,
all you need to do is to patent it. Its almost certain that sometime in the
future someone else will have the same idea.

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dctoedt
That's precisely the way U.S. patent law works -- to be entitled to a patent
for a new and non-obvious invention, you're not required even to have actually
made the invention ("reduced it to practice"), let alone commercialized it.

If you actually conceived the new invention yourself (i.e., you didn't copy
it), and you were the first to do so, then basically all you have to do is
provide a written description of the invention that would enable a
hypothetical "person of ordinary skill" in the relevant art(s) to make and use
the invention.

(There are other requirements too, of course - for example, you have to
disclose the "best mode," as then subjectively contemplated by you, for
practicing the invention; you have to provide at least one written claim,
which in essence is an infringement checklist; you have to disclose to the
patent examiner all "information material to patentability" that you know
about; you can't wait more than one year after the first offer for sale,
public use, publication, etc.)

Here's the underlying assumption: The first inventor should be allowed to set
up a toll booth for 20 years (originally 17 years) as a reward for "merely"
documenting how to practice the invention in a centralized national database,
that is, in the Patent Office collection.

That might have made sense 200 years ago. But I've long wondered whether that
part of the patent law has outlived its usefulness -- arguably we don't need
the same incentives to help build up a national library of engineering
knowledge as we did in 1790.

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pelle
My guess is that this is the patent:

[http://www.google.com/patents?id=ff4OAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=ff4OAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q=&f=false)

It looks like the patent covers a process for inviting to connect with users
or "friending".

I can't believe that anyone hadn't done that before 2001. But I can't quite
recall any in particular.

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dctoedt
It'll be interesting to see what claim language emerges from reexamination.

You can think of each individual claim in a patent as being a separate
"infringement checklist." For a given claim to be infringed, all the elements
of the claim must be present in the accused product or method, either
literally or in the form of an "equivalent."

A claim is like an AND statement: If any element in a given claim is missing
from the accused product or method (and a substantial "equivalent" of the
missing element isn't there either), then that claim isn't infringed.

Note, however, that the several claims of a patent are OR'd together -- you
might not infringe claim 1, but you still might infringe claim 15. All the
patent owner needs to prove is infringement of a single claim.

(This assumes that the accused infringer doesn't prove that the infringed
claims are invalid. In over-simplified terms, if the AND statement of a claim
returns TRUE when applied to the prior art, then THAT claim is invalid.
[Proving obviousness is a more-complicated analysis.])

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costan
I like the nice succinct description of claims. Thanks!

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holdenc
This article follows nicely on the heels of Clay Shirky's post that touches on
why complex societies fail. The current system of patents desperately needs
simplification, but bureaucratic and legal complexity hinder this.

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binspace
Patents maybe were effective at encouraging innovation before the information
age. Now that innovation happens so rapidly, patents slow things down.

Currently, Patents are all about making certain techniques (business
processes, algorithms, etc.) illegal unless licensed.

Who honestly reads patents to learn about technology anymore?

