Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

Lookin’ for cash, “in all the wrong places….”

Hey! It worked BEFORE!

Less than six weeks after Facebook filed paperwork for an initial public offering (IPO) that is expected sometime this spring, Yahoo has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook, claiming, among other things, that “Facebook’s entire social network model” is based upon patented Yahoo technology!

“For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo got there first and was therefore granted patents by the United States Patent Office to protect those innovations,” the Yahoo filing says.

The lawsuit also claims that such things as the News Feed in Facebook and Facebook privacy controls infringe Yahoo’s patents. The filing refers to U.S. Patent No. 7,599,935 – Control for enabling a user to preview display of selected content based on another user’s authorization level and U.S. Patent No. 7,373,599 – Method and system for optimum placement of advertisements on a webpage, which are both described in more detail in the CNET article.

The Yahoo lawsuit is reminiscent of its patent dispute with Google, TWO WEEKS before Google went public, over pay-per-click and bidding systems that give sites higher placement in Web results. In the settlement of THAT suit, Google agreed to license several Yahoo patents and to give Yahoo 2.7 million shares of its stock valued as high as $290 million at that time.

“Litigation is a business tool,” said Clark S. Stone, a patent expert with the law firm of Haynes and Boone. He suggested that the companies may try to settle out of court, if possible. “This sort of thing is not in many instances designed to solve problems where you have a company technically stepping on another company’s toes. Yahoo, because it’s been in the game longer, has a bigger portfolio of patents…Whether or not anything on Facebook infringes any Yahoo patents–assuming they’re valid–probably going <sic> is going to be the subject of pretty protracted litigation or a fairly quick business dispute.”

Facebook released statements expressing its “disappointment” that Yahoo resorted to litigation and said that it “…learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media.”

I wonder if anyone has calculated the optimal ration of lawyers:engineers for a high-tech company. Although litigation may be a business tool, what it REALLY is is a metaphor for a duel between hot-headed, aggressive Myers-Briggs _NTJ types who seeming only learn by opposition and conflict. The metaphor keeps it nice and clean for people who like to live inside their heads and send their “seconds” (teams of lawyers) to fight their battles FOR them, in an artificial battleground, the courts. Normally, such folks express their hormone-driven adolescence through such competitive “displacement activities” as sports contests and yacht racing. I always thought that it would be better to put the two CEOs in a small room with short swords – after all, there is no SHORTAGE of greedy potential replacements.

-Bill at

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