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This morning the web is awash with worry over the US Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to grant a patent on presenting news feeds about activities in social networks based on an application first filed by Facebook in 2006.
This is another case of taking a very generic idea with utterly no novel engineering behind it and turning it into a patentable innovation by attaching it to a subject domain. This is almost the same recipe that cooks up most business method patents.
Take a generic idea like reporting something of interest, qualify it slightly, throw in some generic computing steps like turning references to resources into hypertext links to them, sorting items, or displaying some content, and be the first to the patent office with a permutation that hasn’t been patented yet.
In this case, “generate a news feed”, “attach informational links”, “attach links that let you perform some actions with the current item”, “limit who sees what (i.e. don’t display info about people the user doesn’t know)”, “sort the news items”, and finally “display them”. This sort of “innovation” is totally generic and obvious in that each step could apply to any kind of information stored on a computer and nowhere in such a patent does anyone learn anything they wouldn’t have thought of doing themselves if tasked with solving the same problem. In short, all that is being rewarded is paying the patent application fees to enrich the government.
Indeed, the innovation here is so trivial that no real programmer with an ounce of integrity would consider it worthy of patent protection or worth the time and expense of pursuing the same. Solo programmers and early stage startups simply don’t have the money to play the patent game. Moreover, a patent concept as broad as this would seem so unlikely to be granted before the fact that a developer would be highly unlikely to be able to raise the funds from outside investors to seek it.
Granting Software Patents on sweeping concepts only empowers big companies with deep pockets who can fire this sort of low quality buckshot at the PTO in high volume knowing that a few of their applications will slip through giving them the power to extract royalties from big competitors and to stifle the formation of smaller ones. Every time a patent like this is granted it becomes much harder for true innovators to get backing and bring real innovation to the market. The cost and threat of litigation forces them to sell out to a big player, to shutter their doors if challenged, or more likely to not even bother trying in the first place.
Unfortunately, we will never know how many jobs have been lost or never created because our legal culture falsely assumes that software innovation would not take place but for the existence of patent monopolies. Sadly, since small scale innovators can’t afford to lobby congress as effectively as the mega-corporations that benefit from the current system, patent reform is unlikely in the short run.
That leaves the onus on End Users like you to use your market power en-mass to punish companies that use sweeping software patents unethically. While you can’t do anything to influence Patent Trolls, you can bring pressure to bear on real companies that depend on your patronage as part of their business models.
Facebook is such a company and we trust that it will most likely do the right thing and commit this patent to the Public Domain or promise to only use it defensively if confronted by similar claims. Indeed, it was most likely fear of just his sort of patent being granted to someone else that drove Facebook’s business decision to pursue it in the first place.
However, if Facebook were to try to employ it offensively against innovative competitors, it would then fall on its customers to take action by abandoning its platform in large enough numbers to force it to rethink its course of action. Since the management team at Facebook is not stupid, it is highly probable that they will do the right thing!
Remember, the best defense against the abuse of Software and Business Method Patents is a vigilant global community of End Users willing to put up with a little inconvenience should the need arise to insure that sleazy business behavior is punished in the marketplace since that is the only way to make ethical business behavior the only profitable way to do business.
[...] End Users Will Prevent the Abuse of Facebook's News Feed Patent … [...]
[...] End Users Will Prevent the Abuse of Facebook's News Feed Patent … [...]