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Comment by shingen | Hacker News Reader

It's based on the crowd's judgement of merit and who is filing the lawsuit and why.

That is to say, Yahoo is viewed as non-innovative, and their action is viewed to be the result of a new CEO intent on aggressively finding pennies through any means including just by lawsuit. Meanwhile, most of Yahoo's team is apparently against this action.

So, it's the context. If you drop the context and equate Apple to Yahoo, then it's easier to arrive at: why is everybody upset when a company files a patent lawsuit.

I bet the same people upset about Yahoo also find Apple's lawsuits to be distasteful. Apple is viewed as a very innovative company, so they're given slack when it comes to suing over issues related to innovation.

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The reality is Apple filed lawsuit on company that actually invented Mobile Phone (Motorola) about a silly design patent.

Facebook didn't invent anything.

In reality Apple should be the real bad guy in whole patent issue.

Are you trying to say the iPhone changed nothing? It wasn't an innovation and innovation stopped the day Motorola invented the "Mobile Phone"?

Sure, the iPhone is a mobile phone but it's no way any more similar to what Motorola invented than how similar Motorola's mobile phone is to the original landline phone.

But, for various legal and practical reasons, Apple isn't suing over the things that made the iPhone and the iPad innovative.

Instead, they're suing over ticky-tack nonsense that other people did before like:

- "slide-to-unlock" (Neonode N1m)

- clicking to call phone numbers they detect in text messages and email (Palm Treo among many, many examples - especially if you look at analogous desktop functionality like recognizing URLs in email that makes the concept obvious)

- tablets that are black rectangles with rounded corners (Knight-Ridder concept tablet from 1994, the movie version of 2001, ...)

Perhaps if more people were aware of exactly what Apple was actually suing over they'd be less supportive.

All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.

Facebook didn't invent anything.

They did invent some interesting infrastructure and dev-level stuff, which they've open-sourced.

but why is it so bad that the new CEO (I dont see that it matters he is new on the job) of any company whether Yahoo! or Xahoo! is going after another multi-billion company that he believes is infringe and making money off of someone's else invention?

I asked that 3 times and got nothing other than downvotes...

Why don't people like software patents? Because their power (total monopoly over an idea) is out of sync with the difficultly in acquiring one (stick an engineer in a room with a notepad for 10 minutes, then get a few lawyers to translate it into legal hieroglyphics).

But you are correct that nobody really cares when the defendant is a multi-billion dollar company. Facebook can look after themselves just fine. If Yahoo were suing a startup, the backlash would be far stronger.

How is being able to personalise a web page innovative? It's just basic common sense. You've been able to "personalise" the desktop on your computer for decades. How does moving things to the web suddenly make it innovative. It's just like all the silly patents that have been filed that take an existing patent and just add "on a mobile device" to the end.

The patent system is broken, these are not the reasons it was created!

but this patent was not filled in 2012, it was submitted when most of us barely understood email or instant messaging. You looking at it from a wrong perspective. Please go back in time and then revise it.

I think patenting a lock slider by Apple is more ridiculous than patenting apparatus to change IM into email.

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