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Facebook Patents The Feed

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54 pointsdmpayton24 comments

Software patents really need to die now.

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.

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).

> 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!

Agreed. It's the system that's broken and at fault, not companies taking out patents.

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.

Ahem: http://twitter.com/kellan/status/9651902873

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.

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 .

[...]

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> .

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.

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

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.

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

But are they non-discriminatory?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If a technique was publicly known, it counts as prior art.

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.

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").

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.

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