From Vegas To Legal

The readers of the Reguligence Weblog are familiar with the fact that I am not a supporter of software and business method patents. Moreover, I am rather a doubter as to those patents’ furtherance to the Information Technology at all. Nevertheless, I should be grateful to Facebook for giving me an occasion to have another post on this issue.

As you might have already perceived, Facebook has been granted the patent #7669123 for “dynamically providing a newsfeed about a user of a social network”. Basically, Facebook has patented the news feed that provides a user of their social network with the information about what other users are currently doing or at best have done on that network.

To me this is a trivial patent par excellence. While the patent eligibility could be easily satisfied under the Federal Circuit’s holding in Bilski, in pursuance to which “a method claim is surely patentable subject matter if (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. ” and a social network could (arguably) serve as an “apparatus”, there are some doubts with respect to that patent’s novelty and non-obviousness. According to GIGAOM, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own. As regards the inventive step applied, I believe that aforementioned “invention” would be laughably obvious even to a person having just basic knowledge in social networks, not to mention a “person skilled in the art”.

Notwithstanding, the patent, albeit a “weak” one, has been granted and – unless successfully challenged and invalidated- will be valid for the next 17-18 years. I am personally curious whether Facebook will at some time take the risk and attempt enforcement, and hence share the destiny of Amazon and their one-click-patent.