The Social Networking Patent Thicket Consists Of At Least 30,000 Patents

from the functional-forgeries dept

M-CAM's analysis of the Yahoo/Facebook patent nuclear war has some interesting points. It's worth checking out the full thing, but I wanted to call attention to two them. First, in showing just how ridiculous the patent situation is in the social networking space, M-CAM looks just at the 10 patents that Facebook is asserting in its counterclaims against Yahoo, and discovered that there are over 30,000 related patents that cover similar aspects -- many of which have been around for a while. Notably, IBM (who just sold Facebook a bunch of patents) holds the largest batch of such patents, but that's only 270 patents, meaning these patents are really widely spread out.

In other words, there's a massive patent thicket in the social networking space. I don't how see anyone can legitimately suggest that the patent system is working when someone developing a social network has to be concerned about the fact that they might get sued over upwards of 30,000 patents. If anything, this is just another example of the point that Tim Lee and Christina Mulligan recently made in showing how it's mathematically impossible to avoid infringing on patents if you're developing software these days. No sane person thinks that 30,000 patents make sense for social networking.

As the report notes, a very large number of these patents are "functional forgeries" in that they cover stuff that's in other patents. Really what this goes back to is the fact that the patent system relies on patent examiners to magically know what's new and non-obvious. But, if it's impossible for those who actually work in the space to know about the 30,000 related patents, how do you think a patent examiner does it? The answer is they don't. Patent examiners simply don't scale, and that's a huge problem with the way the system is designed today.

And that brings us to the second point in the M-CAM report, which highlights just how ridiculous the process is to get patent examiners to approve a patent can be. M-CAM looks specifically at the process that got Patent 8,150,913 approved (which happened the same day that Facebook used it in the lawsuit). The report notes that the 913 patent was originally rejected by patent examiner Bharat N. Barot, but the filer amended the claims, and the second time around Barot found them suddenly worthy of a patent. You might think that the changes to go from non-patentable and obvious to patentable and non-obvious would be pretty big. Not so much. M-CAM puts the original claim 1 and the approved claim next to each other and highlights the only difference in blue, which was a ridiculously minor word change towards the end.

Original Submitted Claim 1 of US 8,150,913 Dated: August 22, 2011

Issued Claim 1 of US 8,150,913 Dated: April 3, 2012

1. A computer system that provides a service for controlled access over a network to user profiles having associated image content provided by registered users of the service, the computer system comprising: a networked server system accessible by remote user devices via the network, the networked server system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory; and at least one database accessible by the networked server system and configured to store the user profiles of the registered users, image content items associated with the user profiles, and relationship data that specifies access relationships established between the registered users; the networked server system being programmed, via executable program instructions, to: allow users to register with the service and the registered users to each create a user profile comprising profile information about the respective registered user and a plurality of image content items of data types corresponding to one or more of photo data or video data; allow a first registered user to identify other registered users via a user interface and to indicate a desire to establish an access relationship with the other registered users, wherein each access relationship allows the first registered user to access a user profile of an identified other registered user via the user interface and image content items of the identified other registered user via the user interface; establish access relationships between the first registered user and the other registered users without requiring the other registered users to individually approve the access relationships; allow the first registered user to select from the user interface the user profile of another registered user with respect to which an access relationship has been established with the first registered user, in response to which the networked server system provides the selected user profile for display to the first registered in the user interface, wherein the selected user profile includes representations of at least some of the image content items associated with the selected user profile; allow the first registered user to select and view one of the image content items in the user interface; and allow the first registered user to interact with the selected image content item via interactive controls of the user interface.

1. A computer system that provides a service for controlled access over a network to user profiles having associated image content provided by registered users of the service, the computer system comprising: a networked server system accessible by remote user devices via the network, the networked server system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory; and at least one database accessible by the networked server system and configured to store the user profiles of the registered users, image content items associated with the user profiles, and relationship data that specifies access relationships established between the registered users; the networked server system being programmed, via executable program instructions, to: allow users to register with the service and the registered users to each create a user profile comprising profile information about the respective registered user and a plurality of image content items of data types corresponding to one or more of photo data or video data; allow a first registered user to identify other registered users via a user interface and to indicate a desire to establish an access relationship with the other registered users, wherein each access relationship allows the first registered user to access a user profile of an identified other registered user via the user interface and image content items of the identified other registered user via the user interface; establish access relationships between the first registered user and the other registered users without requiring the other registered users to individually approve the access relationships; allow the first registered user to select from the user interface the user profile of another registered user with respect to which an access relationship has been established with the first registered user, in response to which the networked server system provides the selected user profile for display to the first registered user in the user interface, wherein the selected user profile includes representations of at least some of the image content items associated with the selected user profile; allow the first registered user to select and view at least one of the image content items associated with the selected user profile in the user interface; and allow the first registered user to interact with the selected image content item via interactive controls of the user interface.

Yes, the words in blue are apparently the sum total of the difference between something that's unpatentable and something that gives you a monopoly you can sue over.

Any patent lawyers want to defend this kind of ridiculousness?

Filed Under: m-cam, patent thicket, social networking
Companies: facebook, yahoo