Facebook Buys 750 IBM Patents, According To A Source

By Dan Levine and Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook has acquired hundreds of patents from International Business Machines Corp as the social networking company attempts to bolster its intellectual property portfolio in the wake of a lawsuit filed by Yahoo.

The 750 patents from IBM cover a broad range of technology, ranging from search to semiconductors, according to a person familiar with the matter. A Facebook spokeswoman said the company had no comment, and an IBM representative could not immediately be reached.

Yahoo sued Facebook earlier this month, claiming that Facebook infringed 10 patents, including several that cover online advertising technology.

A classic defense for companies targeted with patent claims is to threaten a countersuit using its own patents. But Yahoo possesses far more patents than Facebook. Before the IBM transaction, Yahoo had over 3,300 patents and published patent applications, according to a U.S. government database.

Facebook had 56 issued patents and 503 applications as of December 31, the company said in a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Facebook, the world's largest Internet social networking service, is preparing for an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $100 billion.

It is unclear how much Facebook paid for the IBM patents, but tech companies seeking to build their portfolios have pushed intellectual property prices higher. Google agreed to buy Motorola Mobility last summer for $12.5 billion, and said Motorola's patents were a prime attraction.

That deal came after Nortel Networks Corp sold about 6,000 patents to an Apple Inc-led consortium for $4.5 billion, after Google bowed out of the bidding.

IBM's transaction with Facebook was first reported by Bloomberg.

(Reporting by Dan Levine and Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric)

Comments

[guy girl]

01:25 AM on 03/24/2012

Corporate lawyering versus corporate lawyering. And, Facebook considering buying or trying to usurp Yahoo at it's on game. Both are dying behemoths, with Yahoo in it's last decade; Facebook, which I believe will fall very fast, on the same death timeline.

[jsarets]

12:22 PM on 03/23/2012

Software patents are impractical. The Cato Institute calculated that the cost of discovering any patents which might be infringed during the development of software products would exceed the total revenues of the entire software industry and would require 50 times as many patent lawyers as there are licensed to practice in the United States.

In other technical fields, such as pharmaceuticals, it is trivially easy to search the patent database for particular molecular formulas. But with software patents, it is difficult to determine what aspects of a software product may have been patented, and furthermore it is difficult to imagine how a particular concept may have been described in a hypothetical patent application.

Software is built on metaphors and other types of conceptual abstractions which greatly affect the vocabulary used to describe the functionality. Two developers can define the same feature in wildly different language -- and that applies to programming language, natural language, and patent language. This is catastrophically problematic for software patents.

Yahoo might use language like "world model" to describe the same thing that Facebook considers a "social graph". This may not affect the judicial determination of patent infringement, but it substantially complicates the pre-determination of patent infringement during development.

[breakingpoint]

12:11 PM on 03/23/2012

stop using facebook and they won't make money

[BarcelonaGuy]

10:54 AM on 03/23/2012

Stay off FaceBook. Anything and everything you write or anyone else writes about you true or false becomes who and what you are. PERIOD and FOREVER. You can never erase any of it.
Employers are requiring that you give them your password before they consider you for employment. And we were so scared about those baby eating communist that we sacrificed so many young men, and now with the "terrorist". We do it to ourselves. GET OFF FACEBOOK.

[J0E1]

10:52 AM on 03/23/2012

Eventually innovation is going to come to a halt while every tech company starts firing their engineers and replacing them with lawyers.