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.
- US7032030 – Message publishing system and method
- US7596606 – Message publishing system for publishing messages from identified, authorized senders
- US7685247 – System for publishing and converting messages from identified, authorized senders
- US7689658 – Method for publishing messages from identified, authorized senders to subscribers
- US7698372 – System for publishing messages from identified, authorized senders to subscribers
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.
