Yahoo! threatens! Facebook! with! patent! spanking! Like certain other tech companies that have failed to keep up with rivals' innovations, Yahoo! is resorting to a patent battle to top up its revenues. The web firm is trying to persuade Facebook to license ten to 20 of its patents that deal with advertising, personalisation of web pages, social networking and messaging, people …
IIRC, you have to defend trademarks to keep them, but not patents.
In fact, you can look at a new company infringe your patent, wait until they build their whole system on the idea, and then threaten a fully-fledged company that has stakes and high switching costs rather than a small start-up that would just rewrite their code or fold.
1. Method for displaying a message to a customer to inform them that 'they are the 1 millionth customer to visit this page' and have thus won an iPad (or other enticing consumer electronics device.
2. Method for convincing customers to click on advertisements for home working that are guaranteed to make "$thousands per week!", even though they are patently bollocks. This is to be achieved by randomly taking control of the mouse pointer at time of customer click, and re-directing said to desired advert.
3. Method for absolving executives consciences of guilt for running obvious scam advertising.
Sorry, ran out of ideas after that, don't see where the rest of the 7-17 come from. Do Facebook actually use any method of displaying appropriate ads to their customers? I thought it was just random scams that turn up on there. Or is that telling me something about my profile...
Pirate - because Facebook clearly thinks that's what I be.
well .. they are still the second largest search engine and web front end / mail servers for AT&T internet accounts .. a whole lot of people still use free @yahoo mail as well
a lot of lost potential for sure .. but I sure wouldn't want the likes of MS or a lot of other companies having access to my email accounts .. yahoo does nothing with @att.net or @sbcglobal.net accounts that I can see, and when I need to use it (rarely), the web interface for my email is pretty nice
<quote>Like certain other tech companies that have failed to keep up with rivals' innovations, Yahoo! is resorting to a patent battle to top up its revenues.</quote>
So which tech companies are *not* resorting to patent battles to top up revenues? No seriously. Is there any of the top (say) 50 tech companies that are *not* involved in a patent dispute of some form?
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