EasyWeb Innovations, hereafter referred to as ‘EasyWeb’ or, alternatively, ‘some obscure patent troll looking to score coin by suing companies that actually innovate, rather than building and selling something’, has recently filed patent infringement lawsuits against social networking giants Facebook and Twitter. The suits claim EasyWeb holds five patents, with titles such as “Message Publishing System for Publishing Messages from Identified, Authorized Senders”.
Of note is the plaintiff’s lawyer, John Demarais, who is quite famous in patent litigation circles (he went from defending some of the biggest tech firms from patent trolls to working exclusively with and for patent trolls to attack them).
Anyway, EasyWeb claims that Facebook and Twitter – the latter was sued last month, Facebook last week – willfully infringe five of its patents, obtained between 2006 and 2010.
The patents-in-suit are US7032030, US7596606, US7685247, US7689658, US7698372.
Easyweb states that it had informed Twitter and Facebook about the patents first on June 2, 2011, however, neither made any attempts or actions to license the patents-in-suit.
The plaintiff seeks damages (complaint is embedded below screenshot from patent docs).
I’ve reached out to Facebook and Twitter, but they typically don’t comment on pending litigation.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...
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