Yahoo! threatens! Facebook! with! patent! spanking!
Like certain other tech companies that have failed to keep up with rivals' innovations, Yahoo! is resorting to a patent battle to top up its revenues. The web firm is trying to persuade Facebook to license ten to 20 of its patents that deal with advertising, personalisation of web pages, social networking and messaging, people …
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They've had years
to sue for patent infringement.... its only now they are looking to float that Yahoo are now sniffing around...
Yahoo! Goodbye!
Re: They've had years
If that is the case, doesn't that mean the patents have been abdicated?
Re: Re: They've had years
IIRC, you have to defend trademarks to keep them, but not patents.
In fact, you can look at a new company infringe your patent, wait until they build their whole system on the idea, and then threaten a fully-fledged company that has stakes and high switching costs rather than a small start-up that would just rewrite their code or fold.
Hmmmm
1. Method for displaying a message to a customer to inform them that 'they are the 1 millionth customer to visit this page' and have thus won an iPad (or other enticing consumer electronics device.
2. Method for convincing customers to click on advertisements for home working that are guaranteed to make "$thousands per week!", even though they are patently bollocks. This is to be achieved by randomly taking control of the mouse pointer at time of customer click, and re-directing said to desired advert.
3. Method for absolving executives consciences of guilt for running obvious scam advertising.
Sorry, ran out of ideas after that, don't see where the rest of the 7-17 come from. Do Facebook actually use any method of displaying appropriate ads to their customers? I thought it was just random scams that turn up on there. Or is that telling me something about my profile...
Pirate - because Facebook clearly thinks that's what I be.
Yahoo!
They're still going? After all they failed to keep up with Internet search, repeatedly butchered all attempts at delivering a portal site (and when it was partly working, butchered it again) and then murdered their webmail interface, repeatedly.
So what do Yahoo actually do now?
Re: Yahoo!
well .. they are still the second largest search engine and web front end / mail servers for AT&T internet accounts .. a whole lot of people still use free @yahoo mail as well
a lot of lost potential for sure .. but I sure wouldn't want the likes of MS or a lot of other companies having access to my email accounts .. yahoo does nothing with @att.net or @sbcglobal.net accounts that I can see, and when I need to use it (rarely), the web interface for my email is pretty nice
A sad day for innovation
When companies have to litigate instead of innovate its a sad day for the tech industry.
Can't they do something more constructive, like make a more tightly integrated spam-free environment that people would want to use?
Re: A sad day for innovation
When a company moves from innovation to litigation it is no longer part of the tech industry, it is part of the legal industry. It is no more a tech firm than an advertising agency or venture capital fund is a tech firm.
Patent trolls? Patent zombies, more like.
Pump and dump
Nothing like a potential bite out of FB to drive up stock price so the current stock holders can make a (relatively) painless exit.
SCO was really no different except that Darl hired his brother as a lawyer, allowing him to funnel money into the family coffers.
Other tech companies
<quote>Like certain other tech companies that have failed to keep up with rivals' innovations, Yahoo! is resorting to a patent battle to top up its revenues.</quote>
So which tech companies are *not* resorting to patent battles to top up revenues? No seriously. Is there any of the top (say) 50 tech companies that are *not* involved in a patent dispute of some form?
easy solution
Apple can buy YAHOO! and slap google some more as well as bitch slap the FaceBitch
Surely perfect timing
"But it's a pretty nasty time to be springing this on Facebook...IPO...soon"
Not the first time this has been done to a company getting close to an IPO. T'will certainly focus the minds of the FB legal team.
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