Facebook is going to have to defend itself against at least one more lawsuit in the coming months. They’re not just dealing with the ConnectU lawsuit - another one was filed against them last month, in Pennsylvania.
The lawsuit hinges on U.S. Patent 6,519,629 (”System for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in”), which was issued in 2003 and is now owned by the plaintiffs, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners.
This is a flat out patent infringement accusation, and the plaintiff is requesting royalties from Facebook. The patent claims relate to social networks built around communities of users with “common interests.” Facebook, which bases networks around universities, business, etc., is naturally the largest target for the patent offensive.
I emailed Facebook earlier today for a comment. No word back from them yet.
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This seems like the most common and generic patent ever given out.
It seems like they have more in common with Yahoo! Groups than Facebook. It’s all about inviting someone to join specific communities of interest. On Facebook you invite someone to be your friend. No common community relationship necessarily exists.
Software patents do nothing to encourage innovation. They stifle it. They provide no positive value to our society and should be done away with. I hate this sh*t.
I don’t think this patent would stand up court would it? surely there was prior art in the form of yahoo groups and forums etc? anyone a patent lawyer here?
But why only facebook?
Facebook’s competition should also be facing the same, I guess.
I’m with #2 also. It’s like reading what Yahoo! Groups is about in patent/legal language. Too bad Yahoo! Groups/eGroups/ONElist existed way before this patent was ever filed, huh? Does the USPTO actually check for prior art or they just assume that the only existing prior art is the one disclosed in the patent (or any other patents)?
I can not understand the patent regulations in U.S. How can they give a patent to such a generic concept. They should look whether the claiming company Plaintiff doing a business around this concept.
This could be a real business model in U.S.
1- Guess the future
2- Get the patents
3- Hire agressive lawyers
4- Build up the trap
5- Wait for a billion dollar bear to ensnare.
This is ridiculous.
If this patent stands up to a court of law in the US then the rest of the world would loose faith in the US patent system. This would have an impact on any community related solution worldwide.
Patents are granted for new and innovative developments and it blows my mind that the US patent office has actually granted this.
Time for Facebook to setup office in Europe.
#6: This IS a business model in the US isn’t it? It’s crazy and insane. It is way too broad and yeah it would cover too many sites and applications that already exist.
Cross Atlantic Capital Partners can someone please explain to me what the hell these guys are doing owning software patents PLEASE???
They VC’s.
This is why i hate VC’s.
I am dealing with them now.
Oh drat - I’m caught up in this! I’ll have to take down all the Lotus Notes websites that I’ve done for the company extranet…. oh. I started doing those in 2001? Must be ‘prior art’ then.
Admin - no need to format the harddisks after all… Admin? Admin?? MEDIC!
Looks like Cross Atlantic is a lead investor in iKimbo (the company
that hold this patent), see the two links below:
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cg.....e?id=24479
http://findarticles.com/p/arti.....i_62169977
Patent 6,519,629 = Strategic Hunting License for Big Fish
http://mail.jabber.org/piperma.....00078.html
In my opinion in any case, Facebook and many other community sites are ripping users and consumers off. We should be charging them for our data instead we keep feeding them for free. This is one big fat cat, no wonder its hot property.
It is now increasingly common for hedge funds to back patent trolls. See this article:
http://www.forbes.com/free_for.....r=yahoomag
This reminds me of the Blackboard patent, for those who dont know what this is check out this article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4790485.stm
Facebook .. com on .. com 2 India soon ….. I just now heard that there is also another patent in US [ U.S. Patent 6,519,629 - Develop a website and host it in a server ] !!!
………
I’m a Dutch law student and i’m doing a master thesis about the patentability of business method in the US (and whether they should be granted in Europe as well), with a specific focus on internet and web 2.0. To build up case material, I would be delighted to get some more examples of lawsuits in which a company was accused of infringing a very common and generic business method patent.
I guess ORKUT is also in trouble
…. [ the user generated communities concept ] 
Michel: patents on generic concepts are absolutely evil and there’s not a single concievable reason to allow them “for public interest”!
Regarding this particular lawsuit, just browsing the patent makes it totally irrelevant to Facebook. It explicitly involves a software which must not be a browser, but a custom program, to access the communities.
End of page 27/begin of page 28 of the PDF file:
“Upon recepit of the transmission, the user executes the EXECUTABLE COMPONENT according to the instructions, such as in a known manner, e.g DOUBLE CLICKING ON AN APPROPRIATE ICON IN A WINDOWS ENVIRONMENT…”
“At this point the program may or may not download additional content objects, additional applications, …. to allow the user to interface .. from OUTSIDE THE BROWSER environment”
It sounds like a totally different thing!
A webpage is no way “an executable component”.
Facebook should expect a big wave of lawsuits like this coming, its just how it works, there will be plenty of people out there trying to get something out of there.
It looks like (using public pair) the patent application dates to sept. 15 1998. That means that any prior art the examiner could use had to come before that date.
You can complain about prior art all you want, but you have to realize that The examiner has to be able to document it for it to be valid. It is difficult to document stuff like what is found in this patent before 1998 (for example, the internet archive for groups.yahoo.com only goes back Jan 30, 2001).
You also have to realize that patent examiners are under intense pressure to get applications out the door. They only really have between 12-47 hours for the entire patent application process, that includes all back and forth with the attorney/agent and all prior art searches.
@ Tekin Tatar (#6)
“I can not understand the patent regulations in U.S. How can they give a patent to such a generic concept.”
The patent office doesn’t make the rules, congress and the courts do. The patent office just follows them even if they don’t necessarily agree with those rules. If Congress and the courts say that patents can be granted for methods (which is what this patent is) as long as no prior art can be found in a reasonable search (which congress did), then that is what the USPTO does (and it’s what they did in this case).
Honestly, if you don’t like what the Patent office is doing, then write your congressman and express your desire for change, otherwise it is up to the courts, for the most part, to change the way the patent office works.
Anyway, back to the patent, personally, after reading through the claims I would have used the usenet archives as prior art because they pre-date 1998 and there has to be a some documentation somewhere that would read on each part of the controlling claims.
I do agree that this patent is sufficiently vague and the company is going to have a tough road ahead proving the patent’s validity. Remember, a Patent grant is only a presumption of validity and it is up to the courts to decide if the patent truly holds weight. Either way, whether Facebook gives in and pays licensing fees or battles it out in court, they’re probably looking at a few million dollars either way…-Metagg
An extract from a seven year old article in The Internatinal Herald Tribune says it all…
“…there remain numerous defects and loopholes in the 210 year old US patent system that will keep lawyers busy well into the next millennium.”
The piece describes Amazons aggressive protection of it’s “revolutionary” one-click shopping system and also the now legendary Comptons Encycopedia multimedia patent. A good read which shows that this is nothing new even though it’s clearly wrong
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Pithy statement taken from the music industry
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Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ.
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With social networks around as early at 1997 (Six Degrees), I can’t see how this patent can hold.
This is simply the base of ANY community. Anyone with a knowledge of Media Sociology would approve that. It first appeared in Aristoteles’ Politica, which was “a priori” to the whole patent system. There are modern research papers (Wellman, Rheinhold etc) that fits this idea as well.
The fact that some people do not understand how communities work is just an advance for us with a media knowledge and lots of experience with PHP.
from a recent patent case against ebay:
“Judge Jerome B. Friedman of Federal District Court denied a motion by the Virginia company, MercExchange, for a permanent injunction to stop eBay from using the feature. The Supreme Court ruled last year that, although eBay infringed upon MercExchange’s patent for the service, it was up to the lower court to decide whether eBay had to stop using it. ‘MercExchange has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market share, reputation, good will, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these,’ he wrote.”
http://yro.slashdot.org/articl.....28/2012251
I’ve read furtherly the patent and it really sounds like a custom Multi-communities program. A piece of software, on the client side, to be downloaded, which allows you to easily subscribe and use highly customizable communities.
It is not related to a website in any way! In the preamble it explicitly says that the Web is to complex, scattered, needs the ability to use a browser, know the site where you want to go, bla bla bla. The explicit aim of the invention is to go beyond this, providing a way to avoid using all that staff (that is: websites!) and making it easy for everyone to partecipate and create communities… through a custom “one click and go” software!
The real irony is that the Web and all the evil thing the invention wants to override and avoid to the user, have ovverriden the invention, in the meantime!
It’s a totally useless patent for a never realized new client/server software that never got realized (it could have been an intereseting one, BTW, if realeased in 2001!) and now it’s totally osbolete. I think the Facebook attorneys will displace it in the shredder as soon as they read the content of the patent!
Eran Hammer-Lahav wrote:
“With social networks around as early at 1997 (Six Degrees), I can’t see how this patent can hold.”
The patent is not on social networks and communities as it may apparently sound by its title. It’s for an innovative piece of software with a new trasmission protocol, dedicated to creating and using custom communities and application modules. In itself it is perfectly valid. As far as I know, no software of that kind has ever been produced.
The fact is that we don’t need it anymore now! Probably the plaintiff just read the title and thought “Hey, we can sue anyone with this”, but never read the content!
Do that and you’ll see why it’s useless nowadays.
Anyway, I’m European and we have no software patents here. So, who cares?
It would be absurd to uphold this patent. BBS has been around since the 1970s, and the patent doesn’t seem to really differentiate there software from a basic BBS system on any fundamental level.
only in america can you find this kind of patent-system. In most other countries patents are give for actual inventions, on HOW things are done. Not WHAT that is done.
This is very much a WHAT; a community around interests.. it’s just bizarre that the american people and business accept such a stupid system, since its harm both the people and the business.
“The lawsuit hinges on U.S. Patent 6,519,629 (”System for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in”), which was issued in 2003 and is now owned by the plaintiffs, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners.”
Has the Cross Atlantic Capital Partners ever heard of forums? Those systems were in place well before Facebook was established.
I created a social networking site way back in 2001 here is the archive link http://web.archive.org/web/200.....hobby.com/. It never went anywhere but I had email and the concept of clubs and groups.
This is an interesting situation. I am rolling out some projects of my own, and anytime I pitch the idea to someone, they ask “is this something you can patent? Have you filed a patent?” Rarely is a hot new website EVER introducing a new technology. The people that are “patent happy” are generally not the innovators from the tech sector, rather they are the wanna-be’s from the tradiational business world that are trying to make the 2.0 generation conform.
Another good reason to ban software patents.
this patent won’t stand up in court as my company owns patent number 5,324,678 entitled [a website that can be visited on the internet]… its worth billions
I agree with Jarrod, a lot of VC’s are focused on concepts that can be patented in order to have some kind of security that their idea can’t be easily copied by others. This protectionistic view has also been the cause that the court ruled the 1998 State Street case which made it possible to patent these so called “business method patents” (which is not the same as a software patent). As software and internet became more and more important, there needed to be some way to protect this, which eventually lead to the State Street ruling. Second problem is the extreme overload of patents the USPTO faces, which makes it virtually impossible to examine all the patents in great detail and investigating deaply into pior art. The result: obvious and generic patents are granted, leading to lawsuits and cross-licensing and a large number of companies that are just filing patents they aren’t going to use to sew some other company (like facebook) if they somehow infringe it.
What a joke. Moustafa M. Meky (the patent examiner) must not have spent much time looking for “prior art”. Consumer Review and its communities around common product interest (enthusiast communities) has been around since 1996.
Speaking of ConnectU, they have until tomorrow to amend and refile their complaint. I wonder if they managed to dig up a contract with Zuckerberg, if they didn’t, that is getting dismissed.
On the current case… The patent is ridiculous on its face.
How can you get awarded a patent on “a system for creating a community for users with common interests”? I totally agree with Tekin Tatar. We should guess the trend, get the patent and sue everyone who has made it big on the idea.
How stupid it is to award such a patent?
I hope that Cross Atlantic Capital Partners doesn’t sue my grandma’s sewing circle…
Should have saved themselves A LOT of headache and took the Yahoo $1B payment.
Greed!
“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.” - Wilde
Wow. I understand the business model of patent trolls, but c’mon. If they start going after start-ups instead of the monster’s, things will get quite ridiculous re: innovation. Few entrepreneurs react well to litigation like this if it comes in at an early stage.
Wish they’d instead invest in companies rather than trying to essentially steal their success.
I think you guys don’t get it.
Some people are afraid of Facebook. Facebook is actually the next raise of evil empire. no one can stop him. Of course, half people got brainwashed and supported Facebook.
You can’t stop him and facebook. Government and companies can’t evil stop facebook either. IT’s like cutting octopus arms. It grows back.
Facebook have stole tons of privacy datas, including: CIA, FBI, Havard Univeristy, State University, across campus, etc.
Can you stop him? Of course not….
If you know of prior art which invalidates this patent, you can always post such information on the PatentFizz.com page for that patent:
Helps if you add the URL…
http://patentfizz.com/fizzdisp.....;Submit=Go
I’m no patent lawyer, but this won’t stand up in court. It might have a year or two ago when Facebook was closed and did connect people based on similarities (schools etc), but now its just an open ground where I can make friends with everyone.
Also, who the heck awarded this patent? Software patents are insane and need some serious reform. Soon enough all startups are going to need a company of lawyers just to make sure they don’t violate some piece of crap patent filed by IBM or a patent farm just for the hell of it.
The law firm suing Facebook is managed by one of the partners of the firm owning the patent:
Frederick C. Tecce, Esq
http://www.xacp.com/the_team.htm
http://www.mcshea-tecce.com/
Their Claim: “System for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in”
Prior Art? Is this a poorly timed April Fools Joke using Kiko?
According to their claim, they are also entitled to pursue every other site on the Internet with more than two simultaneous users, that’s their definition of “community”. Oh, yes, provided one such user has an email address.
This is another frivolous lawsuit for a really generic and obvious idea. The patent shouldn’t have even been issued in the first place.
All this does is promote lawsuits over real executed innovation.
* US 5,796,967 - Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service.
Thats Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and well anyone with a tag on there site
* US 5,442,771 - Storing Data in an Interactive Network.
All search engines, and well database applications
* US 7,072,849 - Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service.
All commercial sites , and site services
* US 5,446,891 - Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities.
Ebay, Yahoo, MSN, all ad networks and everything that involves customer history.
* US 5,319,542 - Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue.
Heheh I don’t even have to say it.
so many patents like this have been brought to bare that we never talk about.. but its really an everyday thing. Most know that a patent protfolio like this is about MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and not actually used to defend a state sanctioned monopoly in the US (and US alone, rendering US companies at a distinct disadvantage in the global economy)