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The Blame Game: Intellectual Property Analysis of Yahoo! v Facebook v Yahoo! v Facebook

On April 27, 2012, in response to Facebook's counterclaim, Yahoo! asserted two additional advertising patents against Facebook. Yahoo! also asked for invalidation of the asserted Facebook patents, and claimed most of the patents were bought from non-operating entities for the purpose of retaliation. Both parties may be interested in knowing that neither was the first to the online advertising race, as there are thousands of patents, with tens of thousands of similar claims, that overlap Yahoo!’s recent patent assertions.

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Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better: Intellectual Property Analysis of Facebook, Inc. v Yahoo!, Inc.

The fight to retain investors is on. In response to Yahoo!’s recent patent infringement suit, Facebook has filed a counterclaim using ten patents of its own. Well, sort of their own. Of the patents asserted, only two were originally assigned to Facebook, which further illustrates our point that Facebook's patent activity is indicative of a company desperate for patent protection. However, Yahoo!’s litigation indicates desperation for revenue, having recently announced plans to layoff 14% of its employees. Could this fight have been avoided, sparing both litigation expenses and JOBS?

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Defriending Facebook: Intellectual Property Analysis of Yahoo! Inc. v Facebook, Inc.

On March 12, 2012, Yahoo! filed a patent infringement suit against Facebook. In the complaint, Yahoo! alleges that “Facebook's entire social networking model … is based on Yahoo!'s patent social networking technology.” A bold statement, since all but one of the asserted patents underwent extensive claim amendments AFTER Facebook was incorporated in 2004. What does this mean? It means the asserted Yahoo! patents have the dual benefit of a pre-2004 application date and a post-2004 visibility into technologies that Facebook had already reduced to practice.

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