No, I’m not kidding. I’d heard rumors of this coming, but there you go.
It seems incredibly obvious with the timing (and past history) that this is an attempt to get a settlement out of Facebook to give them some cash. However reactions I’ve seen across the net are mostly “what a load.”
For Facebook, well, they’ll weather this (they have other problems). For Yahoo this looks incredibly pathetic (and a repeat of their suit against Google), and breaks a kind of unwritten rule among web companies of “don’t sue over this.” They’re going to loose a lot of sympathy over this.
Also, frankly, the patents don’t seem to be very defendable because they’re rather general (though the linked analysis seems a bit off) and look like the kind of things Yahoo could sue enormous amounts of companies over. Some good lawyers could probably take this thing apart fast.
This is humiliating for Yahoo, and smells of desperation to me – they’re resorting to patent trolling. Sure they might win – or they might get smashed while everyone else looks on and applauds. But they’re making a lot of people angry.
If they’re resorting to this level of action to raise money, I’m going to say take Yahoo OFF your to-work for list. I think they may be in worse trouble than we thought.
– Steven Savage