WhoGlue Inc., a small Baltimore company that develops and sells software to manage online memberships and facilitate communications between members, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Delaware against Facebook on Monday. WhoGlue claims that Facebook continued to infringe on its patent despite Facebook having "notice and knowledge" that WhoGlue’s patent existed.
Facebook, as 300 million of us active users know, is a major social networking website based in Palo Alto California and incorporated in Delaware. It was founded in 2004 by several Harvard students and first gained popularity on college campuses. Three years prior to Facebook’s founding, WhoGlue filed for a patent called “Distributed personal relationship information management system and methods.” WhoGlue received its patent (U.S. Patent No. 7,246, 164 B2) on July 17, 2007.
Users of both Facebook and WhoGlue would likely agree that the technologies are similar. On Facebook you can send a “friend request” and “poke” other users, while members who utilize WhoGlue’s software can approach other members via a “handshake.” Likewise, Facebook users can view a “news feed” to stay current on the activities of other users and through WhoGlue’s software members can view an electronic newspaper that publishes items that are tailored to user preferences.
Professor Max Oppenheimer (no relation), specializing in Intellectual Property at the University of Baltimore School of Law, told The Baltimore Sun that for a small company like WhoGlue to succeed in patent litigation, its greatest challenge will be ensuring it has enough resources to fund the expensive litigation process long enough for the court to ultimately issue a ruling, or at least have a law firm willing to represent it on a contingency-fee basis. Professor Oppenheimer also explained that Facebook has the burden to demonstrate that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office erred in issuing WhoGlue’s patent.
While it is too early to speculate whether WhoGlue’s patent infringement case against Facebook will spawn a slew of patent litigation against other social networking sites that use similar technologies, it will be interesting to see the fates of sites like Classmates.com, Friendster, LinkedIn, and MyYearbook.com unfold in the wake of this case.
Editor’s Note: Guest blogger koppenhe [at] email [dot] unc [dot] edu (Kathleen D. Oppenheimer) is a second-year student at the UNC School of Law, pursuing a dual Master of City and Regional Planning degree.
Comments
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I think Professor Oppenheimer hit the nail on the head. It would seem that a smaller tech company like WhoGlue would have a hard time against a larger company like Facebook. However, WhoGlue does have a very interesting minority stakeholder... Siemens (yes, that Siemens). Of course, this doesn't mean that they will fund a long and arduous litigation process, but it does add an interesting element of "what-if".
Although I am far from an expert in patent law, at the time of filing for this patent, it would appear that this idea was new (novel) and non-obvious. If they can survive/finance the litigation, they may very well be on to something here.
For those who are interested, the case is: WhoGlue Inc. v. Facebook Inc., 09CV705, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington).
The Settlement
I am ignorant about WhoGlue, but one could guess that WhoGlue is going for the settlement. The fact that WhoGlue waited till now to file could look suspicious. Facebook is pretty well-known and has been for a while. One could view this as WhoGlue sitting on their rights while Facebook does all of the work to obtain its profitability, then WhoGlue comes in at the last minute to reap the profits in an infringement suit. Of course, I am not saying that this is the case. I do not know any of the facts, nor am I that knowledgeable in Patent Law. Just going off of what you stated here, I think WhoGlue has more of an uphill battle.
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