None of this patent fight between facebook and yahoo will "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". It's a giant waste of time and resources. Software patents should be invalidated.<p>(Quote from the Copyright and Patent Clause of the U.S. Constitution.)
Extrapolating from the contents of the software patents I have seen, I shudder to think at how much utter slop and obvious-to-any-engineer-versed-in-the-field kinds of patents are going to be among those 750. "A method by which a button is rendered on the screen such that it can be clicked on with a mouse, causing some action to occur." etc, etc. Also the fact that any company could even buy software patents, let alone buy 750 of them, makes the system look absurd. The whole point was to reward the original inventors. Now it rewards trolls and lawyers and those with big war chests.<p>(a method by which my comments are posted to a website configured as a discussion forum with an orange bar at the top. the target website may also include links to other pages, and include caching.)
Given the projected market cap of Facebook, relative to Yahoo, the settlement could be worth 1/2 of Yahoo's market cap or more. Given Yahoo's revenues and they way patent infringement is punitively calculated, the infringement on Facebook's newly accounted patents would have to be worth a huge portion of Yahoo's revenue to matter. Otherwise, Yahoo could just close down the infringing services, settle on the back stuff, and continue suing Facebook.<p>If IBM's patents were core to how Yahoo made money, IBM would have already sued and / or licensed them to Yahoo. The fact that they didn't, leads me to believe that a lot of attorneys, on Facebook's behalf, are going to be billing tons of hours looking to find a square needle, to fit into a round hole, at the bottom of a HUGE haystack.
That's a pretty smart way to deal with the problem. Yahoo is not a patent troll in the sense that it has no assets of its own to lose. It is far more vulnerable to this sort of counterattack than, say, Intellectual Ventures.