Even giants like Facebook can be challenged by small companies when it comes to patent lawsuits. There has been a lawsuit on going for almost two years now by the Ohio-based company known as Leader Technologies. The company is a small software development company that develops solutions for minor industries. The Delaware court has knocked down the claim that Leader Technologies filed against Facebook back then.
Lawsuit details
The lawsuit was filed when the company accused Facebook of infringing one of its patent related to the “method and system for the management and storage of electronic information”. The document was patented in 2006 where it said that the “inventions related to new structures and methods for creating relationship between users, applications, files and folders”. This meant that any technology that was supposed to bring users, applications, files and folders together in a relationship will be under the patent of Leader Technologies and no other company can make use of it without their consent.
The beginning of the case was quite hopeful for the Leader Technologies and they have even placed the positive results about the lawsuit on their official website but the overall decision proved to be in the opposite direction though.
Results and response
There was a six day hearing on the subject and finally the decision was made in Facebook’s favor few days back. The members at Facebook welcomed the decision as well as they also stated that the patent laws shall be changed in order to avoid any baseless claims that come from minor companies who have not been making enough in the market. They even stated that Facebook was claiming the patent to be invalid from the very day that it was filed in the court as there seemed no merit nether was there any power in the claim and it sounds quite satisfying that the jury agreed to this. Facebook does not intend to break any rule or patent that is coming from any author as long as that is valid yet they are not going to tolerate any lawsuit filed against them on this topic in the future.
Future of broad patents
The patent document that was under the royalty of Leader Technologies is available online and everyone can see it and judge for the credibility that it offered. The patent needs to be focused on the technology so that no infringement takes place anywhere in the future as well. The broad patents will certainly end up with nothing but similar issues rising every now and then. In the meantime, the court is going to process the cases for their credibility and this will waste a lot of their time. Not only time but a lot of money is wasted this way. Both the parties spend a lot of their revenues to defend their stance in the court while the base of the patent is baseless. Facebook has not come up with the first of the intellectual fronts that it has dealt with this time but there had been many of the similar natured patents in the past as well.
