As reported all over the net this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other Facebook execs have been awarded US Patent #7,699,123: Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a
social network, yet another highly vague, general software patent.  The abstract:

A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.

Really? So it seems the US Patent Office issued a patent for making lists.  Oh, and ordering them and using a permissions schema (undefined) to restrict access to users.  The patent itself goes into a bit more detail, but basically consists of a bunch of black boxes that process information in undisclosed ways, referred to in such informative terms as “step 502” and “activity 404”, with some very basic flowcharts.

This patent could be the poster child for why software (and business method) patents should just be thrown out to begin with.  This type of thing is the very definition of an idea — something that is explicitly excluded from patent, copyright, or trademark protection.  To my reading, this would also fail the machine or transformation test, as there isn’t any reference to any machine involved in this, nor is there any actual transformation going on here, at least not in any novel or non-trivial way. The whole thing is an intentionally vague description of a list ordering process, incorporating several methods  that all are indicative of prior art (permissions, taxonomy, user selections, etc.) and in some cases direct analogues of social practices that have existed since the dawn of time.

To quote Tim Berners-Lee, “If you want a good laugh, go look at patent applications.”  This one sure brought about a chuckle or two.  Maybe not as big a guffaw as when such patent trolls as British Telecom tried to sue Prodigy over the claim that they owned hyperlinks, or the Compton’s patent that supposedly covered all multimedia and computer applications, but close.

The real laughs are yet to come.  I can’t for a minute believe that Google or NewsCorp would allow this sort of thing to stand.  Granted, this seems more of a defensive patent than anything else, but the broad nature of it, combined with the obvious lack of implementation details that patents usually require, seem to make it an easy target.  There is nothing novel here, no proprietary wizardry that requires any sort of protection, nor any source code that would describe such things in detail.  All this sort of thing does is drain resources — talent, money, and mindshare — all to play out elaborate defensive legal actions due to an intellectual property system that lags behind the times.

Could be worse, i suppose.  At least Metallica hasn’t tried to patent the power chord yet.