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Leader Technologies, an Ohio-based “intellectual capital company”, has filed a lawsuit against Facebook. The company claims that Facebook has infringed on one of their patents which relates generally “to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.” Sounds like a fairly broad patent which the company simply uses to obtain recurring revenue from large digital companies.
Calling the company a “Patent Squatter” is probably not completely fair as the company actually does develop physical products as well including the “Leader Phone” and the “Leader Alert”. It appears that the company spends a lot of their time focused on IP though. Given that the company uses the tagline “The Intellectual Capital Company”, I don’t think it would be inaccurate to state that this company invests heavily in their intellectual property.
So what is this patent about? If you’d like you can read the entire patent below but according to the paten document, “this invention relates to new structures and methods for creating relationships between users, applications, files, and folders.” The patent also includes some images which I haven’t included as the viewer was not compatible with my browser.
Either way, it sounds like this is a fairly broad patent and this could easily result in a fine for Facebook. My guess is that this has been handed over to Facebook’s lawyers and this will be resolved expeditiously but there is always a chance that the plaintiff will want more money as was the case with the Winkelvoss brothers.
That lawsuit lasted for years and was eventually settled out of court. We’ll be interested to see what happens with this suit.
How on earth did this get patented? This was already out there long before 2003, so I don’t get how this made it past the smell test.
I worked at a telecom company in 2000 where I developed a contextual faceted system (I described it as “cognitive knowledge management” in a paper at the time) that did all this many-to-many, contextual work among a broad variety of entities. We didn’t pursue patents because such things were in the web zeitgeist back then. The idea, while original, proved not to be unique.
These people either didn’t do basic research, or trusted the patent office to simply accept what they said.
Grrr. Argh.
Just another piece of evidence to prove how worthless and corrupt the US patent system has become.
Besides a load of jargon designed to look as though they are doing something original, this is no more than any competent software engineer in the early 90’s could dream up, absolutely nothing original here.
Yes implementing a system is more difficult, but that’s copyright not a patent.
Perhaps making it a criminal offence for patent officers to allow this sort of patent through would make them more diligent and thorough in their work – after all patents like this have only one use, and that’s extortion!