Facebook Ordered To Turn Over Source Code 304
consonant writes "A Delaware District Court judge has ordered Facebook to turn over ALL its source code to Leader Technologies, who allege patent infringements by Facebook. The patent in question appears to be for 'associating a piece of data with multiple categories.'
Additionally, while the judge in question deems it fine to let Leader Technologies look at Facebook's source (for a patent, no less!) in its entirety for a single feature, it would be 'overboard to ask a patent holder to disclose all of their products that practice any claim of the patent-in-suit.'"
American "Justice" (Score:2, Insightful)
Looks like all those "campaign contributions" had their intended effect.
Maybe one day someone will bribe our elected officials to do the right thing.
this patenting thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we're getting to the point where people are winning cases because they've effectively patented a design pattern, then we're all in trouble.
I mean, "associating a piece of data with multiple categories" -- sounds like every relational database schema on the planet to me.
Patent infringement x 2! (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone wanna take bets on how long until Leader Technologies comes out with their own social networking site that looks very similar to Facebook, and gets sued for having some technology that infringes on a Facebook patent?
But seriously, shouldn't the court be trying to determine infringement, rather than letting the plaintiff view every piece of code Facebook has written? That's almost like saying "Microsoft infringed on 'using a scroll bar'; let Red Hat view all of the source for Windows so Red Hat can make sure it's not infringing." - if Windows were the only product Microsoft had. It's a crazy statement to make. In industrial terms, it sounds even worse: "Caterpillar might be infringing on a patent for 'method of transporting hydraulic fluid'; give Mitsubishi all of their blueprints for every one of their products so they can make sure it's not infringing".
If you didn't catch it, did you notice the 'obviousness' factor in those examples? Associating data into multiple categories seems pretty obvious, as databases have been doing just that for a long time.
Re:Patent infringement x 2! (Score:1, Insightful)
Not only a long time, but since they were created.
The state of patent law in the US is quite disturbing and definitely anti-competitive.
what? (Score:5, Insightful)
"associating a piece of data with multiple categories"?
Are you kidding me?! So when I create a database table that allows me associate a record with multiple categories I'm infringing on this patent? Surely this isn't the whole story... could someone smarter than me fill me in please?
I am going to go patent taking a wiz in the morning. Apparently prior art doesn't mean anything.
What does Facebook do that is new? (Score:2, Insightful)
While I agree that Facebook is the first well implemented piece of social software of its niche, what is so novel about its design but its momentum?
Does it have anything to do with PHP? Hadoop?
Facebook could be implemented with standard DBMS like MySQL right?
try login when I can be bothered - once a week.
I think there are a few Open source social web networks:
http://mashable.com/2007/07/25/open-source-social-platforms/ [mashable.com]
I find the Frontpage annoying because originally I couldn't work out how to only display things from friends I choose, a whitelist rather than a blacklist. It's actually easy:
Make a list of friends that you want to see updates for and then on the homepage move it to the very top on the left menu. Unintuitive but it works.
And you, slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
Are those multiple tags I see against the summary?
Source, now!
Re:American "Justice" (Score:4, Insightful)
That will happen just as soon as the "right thing" becomes highly profitable for those doing the bribing.
So, never.
How about patent reform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How about patent reform? (Score:5, Insightful)
While we're on a reform kick in this country maybe we could undertake patent reform.
Think of all the corporate money that is being thrown at killing healthcare reform in all it's different guises...
and then multiply it by 200.
That, my friend, is the reason it isn't happening. Find ways to reduce the corporate influence and money in these fights first and then there is a chance.
Re:this patenting thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it may be that every single one of these is obvious and therefore non-patentable but you can't make that determination from the title.
Re:Patent infringement x 2! (Score:5, Insightful)
It really doesn't matter if they do develop a social network site or not. There's been dozens of Myspace and Facebook clones out there. None have particularly succeeded. The underlying tech isn't what drives their success. It's the ability of their Marketing Droids to convince people that the emperor is really not, in fact, stark naked.
RDBMS (Score:2, Insightful)
Excuse me, but isn't there a TON of prior art in this arena, for example, RDBMS and object oriented database systems have done this from the very beginning. What the heck is an RDBMS good for if you can't actually use or display associated objects?
ZOMG! It's being done on a community building site! We'd better patent it because it's a revolutionary concept!
It should fail litmus tests for patents on several grounds:
* Prior art
* Obvious to those skilled in the trade
* is pretty much the whole point of HTML and RDBMS in the first place
* is the whole point of SQL
* is the whole point of being able to test variables if strcmp(strInformation1,strInformation2) {then do something with the result}, etc.
That the patent office granted a patent for associating related data objects at this point is an epic fail underscoring the need for real patent reform.
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, are these claims patentable? I don't know. there is a lot of long-windedness in patent claims, and it depends on how borad or narrow they are interpreted. Obviously the examiner found them to be narrow enough to be patentable. I doubt it's as simple as a one-to-many relation in a database, because even though examiners miss things, they really wouldn't have missed that. Maybe the judge will overturn it though, if he reads the patent more broadly.
Laughable (Score:5, Insightful)
Did ANYONE even read the patent? I'm looking at the patent now, and while it's not rocket science, it's nowhere near as simple as "associating a piece of data with multiple categories". In fact, that quote is from the article, not the patent.
It's a software patent, and therfor, to all of us not living in the United States, laughable.
Re:Patent infringement x 2! (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason facebook was initially popular was because it was for college students only. Once they allowed anyone to have a facebook page, it became the crap fest it is now.
Interestingly enough, if the government created a database like facebook to track citizens, people would be outraged, but make it voluntary and it becomes the next new thing.
Re:this patenting thing ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the day, BBS's had all of this plus eBay's auction functions et al.
Prior art should invalidate most of this stuff. People who have adapted OLD
ideas to the "new" age , are just assholes. 90 percent of all this was done
on Bulletin boards before the internet became popular.
It is time for all of us old timers to bring this silly stuff to an end!
We saw or developed it before ANY of these newbies ever thought of it. Sned
your prior art to the patent office!!! Most of it was copyrighted before
many of these douchebags were born !!!
Re:Patent infringement x 2! (Score:1, Insightful)
That's because if it's voluntary then the paranoid people don't have to have one.
Re:Most OSes fall under the claims of this patent. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's refreshing to see somebody at least try to read the patent. I have a hard time believing anybody could mis-interpret it this badly though. Let's look at part of claim 1:
How would an operating system with a shell qualify as a "network-based system"? Answer: since it's not network-based, it's not even close. Even something like logging in remotely isn't really network-based -- it's based on one computer, and happens to have a network between the CPU and the terminal. Here they seem to be talking about something that's truly network-based -- something intended exclusively (or at least primarily) for access over a network, and (quite possibly) the "server" isn't necessarily a single server, but itself an entire network. Exactly what "network-based" means for this patent doesn't seem entirely clear to me though -- and the patent specification doesn't really tell us either (the phrase "network-based" isn't mentioned in the specification). If that claim is part of the lawsuit, there will probably need to be a "Markman" hearing to decide how the claim should be construed. The court is required to presume that the patent is valid, and therefore attempt to construe the claims in a way that doesn't make prior art obvious -- and in this case, I think "network-based" is pretty easy to construe as meaning something that prevents a normal (or even remote) login from being prior art, so if the issue arises, there seems to be little question that the court would do so.
For those who've talked about tagging being an infringement, I'd note that "metadata tagging" is specifically mentioned in the "background of the invention" as being known related art. Likewise, those who've talked about a: "one to many relationship" (or various similar phrases), that's also mentioned in the background of the invention as already being known, not falling within the patent.
Now, I'm not going to try to argue that the patent is necessarily valid -- that's a question the court will probably need to address, and if Facebook's attorneys are doing their jobs, they'll (have specialists at prior art searching) put a fair amount of effort into researching reasonable possibilities of prior art. It does look, however, like if there is prior art, they probably really are going to have to do some serious work to find it. It might well exist -- quite a few people have been working on similar ideas around the same time, and it's entirely possible somebody else beat these guys to it. If it is out there, however, it's going to take quite a bit of hard, careful work to find it and show that it really does include all the limitations in the claims of the patent.
Just FWIW, I'd also note that to invalidate a patent, you don't just have to find prior art to one of the claims -- you have to find prior art for all the claims, or at least all the claims at suit. Looking at their dependent claims, we find things like:
I don't think Facebook provides all those, so they're probably not being sued over that claim, but for statuatory prior art to invalidate that claim,
Get rid of software patents (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an insane patent to have been granted. The fact that the patent holder is asserting that Facebook is infringing it without having seen their source code is extremely telling - the patent holder appears well aware that the patent (which should never have been granted) is so broad as to cover functionality rather than implementation and therefore anyone who appears to be doing what the patent covers is almost certainly infringing it.
It's as is the patent office granted someone a patent on cracking nuts as opposed to a specific nutcracker design, and the lucky patent holder would then be in a position to go after anyone selling shelled nuts on the grounds that they must have shelled them, ergo they must have violated their patent. Of course nuts, unlike software claims decribed in obfusctated legalese, are easy to understand. I'm 100% positive one could describe assigning a value to a variable in such a complex way, accounting for all possible implenentations, semantics, etc, etc, that some moron at the patent office would think it sounded like a highly technical and specific discovery and no-doubt patent worthy. I think I'll go apply for a patent of comments right now ("in the 42nd embodiment, a source code file, stored in EBDIC format on a USB storage device, embeds self-descriptive components, that will be automatically stripped by the FORmula TRANslation language lexical analyzer, ...").
Given how complex software is, and how difficult it is for lay people to understand it, and given that the patent office in granting things like this make it obvious that they do not have software experts examining these patents, it seems that the whole notion of software patents needs to be reexamined. They are really doing more harm than good, and the intent of patents to encourage innovation is being subverted rather than helped by software patents. The patent office doesn't seem to understand the process of software design/development at all.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that the judge claimed that there is no "legal theory" to support the idea that the suing party should not have to give good examples of things that use the patent in question doesn't mean it's a bogus idea to deny the request.
Yeah, it does... Infringement is in the patent statutes, 35 USC. The judge has to follow those statutes, as enacted by Congress (otherwise he's an Activist Judge!!). For better or for worse, the statutes don't require that the patent holder use the patent in question. So, that's a perfectly cromulent reason to deny the request. It's equivalent to a defendant charged with grand theft auto demanding to see the driving record of the vehicle owner - there's no requirement that the owner ever drove the thing, and no legal theory can support a defense based on "well, he didn't drive his car, so I was free to steal it."
Re:Prior Art? (Score:4, Insightful)
NO! In fact, the patent itself specifically cites a one-to-many relationship as already being known. The attempt at claiming coverage of a one-to-many appears to come only from the incompetent who wrote the summary.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
On another note, who the hell writes these summaries? Do they just have really awful reading comprehension or does all the sensational shit just float to the top? I suppose it's a combination of those 2 things isn't it?
Re:Patent infringement x 2! (Score:2, Insightful)
They might even fix it and return it to Rob out of pity.
Re:That claim (Score:3, Insightful)
They first came for Facebook, and we marveled and pined endlessly over stupid patents.
Next they came for MySpace, and we cheered endlessly.
Finally, they came for Slashdot, and there was nobody else to care.
Re:this patenting thing ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we're getting to the point where people are winning cases because they've effectively patented a design pattern, then we're all in trouble.
I mean, "associating a piece of data with multiple categories" -- sounds like every relational database schema on the planet to me.
You're right and that's exactly what everybody should encourage. Patent trolls are the best friends of those who dislike the patent system. I'll explain why. Nobody will care to reform a system which is quasi functional, but everybody, even lobbyists will push for reform on a system which is completely broken. If any Joe can sue the crap out of a major lobbying corporation for some silly patent you can be damn sure that the corporations will do anything to nullify this. And when the law is with Joe, the only thing left to do is to push for legislation change. So you see in a capitalistic world the absolute best way to make a change about anything is to show that the current structure is unprofitable for all major corporations. See it as "lobbying the lobbyists."
Re:American "Justice" (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely! The laws serve no other purpose than to allow multinational corporations to bully... uhh... other... multinational corporations?
No, it allows more established corporations (and patent trolls) with large patent portfolios to prevent competition from young upstarts. Megacorps don't often go after other megacorps because it would end up as mutually assured destruction. They just cross-license their portfolios.
Re:Patent infringement x 2! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's interesting in the sense that people don't mind their information being available, what they care about is having control over how that information is presented. IMO at least.
Re:Patent infringement x 2! (Score:2, Insightful)
I observed one of these data/source collections for a court case at a previous company I worked for. I have seen where the *security experts* that come to collect the data want to leave with an unencrypted hard drive that would sit in their back seat with all data, and then claim to need to put it available online(simple user name and password protection) so the attorneys, etc can access the data. But don't worry it is secure they said (yea right).
Without arguing with the *security expert* that is precisely what would have happened in that instance. They agreed to make sure the source was not available online but once it is out of your hands who really knows what happens to the data.