Facebook Joins the Patent Smack down Culture on a New Front

Mobile patent wars have raged for a few months. Currently it’s time for high tech battles, part II: patent infringement suits in social networking. Like part of a now year-long ongoing dispute, Facebook filed go with against Phoenix Media/Communications, which owns an alt-weekly and an alternative rock radio station in Boston. Given how young and in change the social media industry is, this type of early assault is likely to recur.

A process for providing a personal page on a computer system accessible to a plurality of remote users during a computer network, the remote users having profile information stored in the computer network and easy to get to other remote users, comprising the steps of:

a.       suitable profile information from a plurality of remote users;

b.      prompting a page-creating remote user with a plurality of page templates for the individual page and receiving a template selection from the remote user;

c.       prompting the page-creating remote user to enter content to the personal page and receiving entered text from the remote user;

d.      prompting the page-creating remote user to select or enter graphical information to present on the personal page and getting the selection or entry from the remote user;

e.       storing attributes representing each choice or entry made by the page-creating remote user in one or more databases;

f.       providing the page-creating remote user with means to input safety parameters for the personal page, the security parameters specifying authorization of at least one other remote user to access the personal page;

g.      storing the security parameters in one or extra databases; and

h.      Displaying the personal page upon request only to remote users who are allowed to access the personal page.

Although Phoenix used the technology for online dating, the patent — filed for in 1997 and granted in 2001 – would seem to cover the personal pages on Facebook … or many other online services. (Why perform I suspect that Facebook is not the only company to hear from Phoenix?) Now, a year later, Facebook is asserting two patents in a countersuit.

This might seem like an aberration, but then so did the opening patent infringement suits in the mobile space, and look how knotted up that has become. And, as additional correlation, when I wrote about Face book location-based social networking patent, I received a digit of emails from special patent holders and lawyers who all seemed to think that they had applicable patent claims that predated those of Facebook. Between to facilitate and the tensions building up between Facebook and Google, I think this could be just the opening of a wave of social networking patent fights. Remember the saying: Follow the wealth and eventually you will run into the lawyers.