Facebook countersues Yahoo over patents
updated 02:10 pm EDT, Tue April 3, 2012
Facebook refuses to back down over Yahoo suit
Facebook responded to Yahoo's web technology lawsuit on Tuesday with a countersuit. The complaint levels 10 patents, including three recent ones. Attorneys at both Cooley and Apple's defense team versus Samsung, Wilmer Hale, are launching the case.
Technologies involved in the lawsuit include those for tagging photos and videos, personalized feeds, recommendations, creating headlines, user profiles, and getting or customizing database information.
The lawsuit comes just days after Facebook bought IBM patents to fill out a catalog that would otherwise be much smaller than Yahoo's. None of the patents come from the IBM set, however, and include both three from New York University as well as two from Philips. Only two are directly from Facebook.
The original Yahoo complaint is widely believed to have been taking advantage of Facebook's possible vulnerability during its pre-IPO period as well as an attempt to boost Yahoo's struggling finances. [via Florian Mueller]
