Post #8: EU States form the Unified Patent Court

The article, EU States Sign Patent Litigation Agreement states that 24 out of the 27 EU states agreed on forming the Unified Patent Court yesterday. Only Spain, Poland, and Bulgaria did not sign the agreement. The Irish minister, Richard Bruton said that “the agreement was ‘a tangible expression of creating a single market in a very important area, the area of patents.’” I agree with minister Bruton, and I think this incidence promotes the future in the patent litigation system. The hopes for protecting the inventors’ ideas across the border are definitely approaching. I feel this article presents an inspirational message to the idea of patents with no border. 

To learn more about the article, please visit: http://www.managingip.com/Article/3157489/Managing-Patents-Archive/EU-states-sign-patent-litigation-agreement-photos.html

Post #7: Facebook Infringed the “Like” Button

Joannes Jozef Everardus Van Der Meer, the founder of Aduna purchased the domain name “surfbook.com.” Surfbook offered an online social networking environment just like Facebook. Surfbook allowed its users to approve data with a “like” button. He was granted the patents in 2001 and 2002. Van Der Meer passed away shortly in 2004. In the memory of Van Der Meer, Rembrandt Social Media filed a complaint for patent infringement against Facebookin the U.S. District Court of Virginia. The article, Facebook Sued for Patent Infringement over “Like” Button and Timeline Function indicated that “ ‘The complaint states that Surfbook also lets users ‘collect personal information and third-party content, organize the information chronologically on a personalized Web page, and share the information with a selected group of people, such as the end user’s friends, through the use of user-settable privacy levels.’ "

Facebook is actually aware of Van Der Meer’s patents, because Facebook cited Van Der Meer’s patents as reference when Facebook was issued a patent for applications on wireless devices. I wonder what Fafcebook is going to do next. I feel like Facebook would either buy the patents if possible, or create another feature that is similar to the “Like” button. This article reminds me when Professor Lavian mentioned in class that 99.999…% inventions are improvement of something in the past, and only 0.0000…1% are actual inventions from original ideas.

See more information from the article, visit: http://www.ipbrief.net/2013/02/19/facebook-sued-for-patent-infringement-over-like-button-and-timeline-function/