Yahoo Sues Facebook for Patent Infringement

Do you work at a company that tells its employees that "patents will only be used defensively"? If so pay attention to this because it is your future.<p>Do you work for a company that gives bonuses for filing patents? Do you use the "only for defensive purposes" assurances as a way to soothe your troubled soul when you take the money? If so, pay attention to this times two.

It is very, very common to wait until just before an IPO to sue. The strategy is that the defendant will be more willing to settle just to get the lawsuit off the books before the IPO. It usually works against smaller companies.<p>Google was the recipient of borderline frivolous legal action just before the IPO, but Google didn't bite. In the case of Facebook, I don't expect anything to be resolved pre-IPO, as Facebook has the momentum to deflect nearly anything at this point.

As an ex-employee of Yahoo, I find this sad and disappointing. Also - unnecessary. Yahoo still has great people, great userbase and great tech. No good can come out of this long term.

The last act of a dying company.

What if instead of suing Facebook, Yahoo proposed to Facebook a greater partnership and deeper integration of its products with the social layer?<p>What if Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News now had an advanced social layer that managed contacts autonomously (like GMail) and becomes official curator of news on a social level? (Not like, here's a lot of news, and then a commentary section. I'm talking a brief abstract with link of rest of article and just a ton of commentary)<p>That would actually make me consider leaving GMail (Really). And for once I would give a dang about the things being posted in my feed, rather than filtering out the majority of my contacts and likes.

Definitely a sign that Yahoo stopped getting profit from doing anything useful, since they fell so low as to use software patents litigations for their income.

I couldn't disagree more with the linkage some have between companies only using patents "defensively" and/or financially rewarding employees to file patents. The two are unrelated.<p>Yahoo is dying. It has been for some time, arguably the better part of a decade. At some point all such companies end up in hands of management and/or a board who simply want to extract every last dime. Much like how some dying stars go supernova, large dying companies often explode in a conflagration of litigation. We saw it with SCO. Now it's Yahoo's turn (apparently).<p>But to argue that this is a product of acquiring patents is ridiculous. Not doing so will do nothing but hasten your demise. Software patents are ridiculous and should be declared invalid (wholesale) but until that happens, that's the system we live in.<p>If anything, the more ridiculous patent lawsuits we have, the more it hastens the onset of commonsense and (hopefully meaningful) patent reform.

Royalty payments? Can someone chime in here on the difference between the royalties Facebook is paying Yahoo versus what fees they want recompensed the lawsuit?<p>From the article "The company adds that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property and that royalty payments alone will not suffice."<p>Isn't there a contract drawn up for a company to pay another company money (i.e. royalties) so that they can't litigate against one another? It just sounds like Yahoo had undervalued or misconstrued how Facebook was going to use their patent tech.

What a disappointing step for Y!'s new CEO to take.<p>Yahoo! is a media company, Facebook is a networking/platform company. They should be looking for ways to work together and build value instead of attacking each other and destroying it.<p>To me, this just looks like a complete waste of Yahoo's time and an incredibly silly way for Yahoo's new CEO to be investing his resources - they have so many problems on so many fronts and the last thing they need to do is draw themselves into another battle.

This seems like it may be the worst patent lawsuit in history. Why the hell did Yahoo think this was a good idea?

I think they mistimed this ... by 19 days!

Isn't Apple alive today partly because of a patent lawsuit with MS that they were going to loose? A I understand the story, in a twist of things, Jobs convinced Gates to invest over a hundred million in Apple, thereby saving the company.

Maybe I'm off my rocker here, but this sounds like "suing your way into being acquired".<p>Is Facebook buying Yahoo not something Yahoo probably wants at this point?<p>Yes, I'm sure there's lots of reasons this might be a bad match- I didn't say I thought yahoo thought it was a good match. Yahoo might be really expensive (even today) for FB to buy. But it just smells that way to me.

So Yahoo is in such a bad condition, that it decided to turn into a patent troll?<p>R.I.P. Yahoo

SOMEBODY wants to get acquired! ;-<i>

over 700 million monthly unique visitors!That's impressive

The patent system is broken, but at least this time it is a company that deserves litigation instead of some poor indie app dev. IMO Facebook is pretty high up on the list of companies with horrible policies, it's bittersweet to see such stupid litigiousness with them as the target.