ReadWriteWeb

Would be patent-trolls searching through commit logs for ideas to patent sounds like a scare-story on a local news station, and the goods news is that there aren't any cut-and-dry cases of this happening yet. However, Tech Dirt's Mike Masnick has found two suspicious instances of patents that may be "borrowing" technology from open source projects. In one case, IBM made the case that it had "improved" on prior art and was granted a patent. Is this something open source developers should be worried about?

RIM, the company behind Blackberry smartphones, is getting into the smart billboard business, according to two patent applications it filed recently. But what would a smartphone maker and roadside advertising have in common? It could be a new way to serve up "adaptive" advertising according to data gathered from nearby Blackberry users.

According to mobile-focused blog Unwired View, the innovation comes in the form of using nearby phones to measure traffic speed and density and then adapting a billboard's content accordingly.

It seems that every week we hear about another patent lawsuit between tech companies claiming the exclusive rights to various technologies and methods. With large corporations like Apple, Google and Microsoft frequently defending patents in court, smaller companies may get the idea that patents are the best way to protect intellectual property. A recent survey from the University of California, Berkeley found that, in fact, the opposite trend is appearing among these types of companies. The largest reason? Cost.

Microsoft filed a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, against Salesforce.com for infringement of nine Microsoft patents, according to Horacio Gutierrez, vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing.

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, "displaying a news feed in a social network environment." Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be "one of the most significant social web patents" in a decade.

If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there's going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. We've got calls and emails in with Facebook PR, we're going to start thinking and reading up about what this could mean but for now, please join us over on Google Buzz to discuss this story as it unfolds in real time. Our coverage continues below.

You're walking down the street. Your phone buzzes, a map or a screen overlay pops up and you're shown a note left in that location by one of your friends - along with an ad for your favorite pizza. Walk into the pizza place and your phone buzzes again - your friends have something to say about the guy behind the counter. That might have sounded far-fetched a few years ago, but it doesn't so much anymore, does it?

18 months ago Yahoo! filed a sophisticated patent on VIRTUAL NOTES IN A REALITY OVERLAY and that patent was published last week. Check out the patent sketches below.

When we wrote our year end posts for 2009, we should've added patent trolling to our list of trends. In the past year we've covered a number of patent disputes including the Word-blocking patent against Microsoft and VoloMedia's patent on podcasting. Union Square Ventures' Brad Burnham wrote an excellent piece today on independent invention and how patent reform can minimize trolls.

Google just received a design patent for Google Search's homepage. It took the US Patent Office over five years to approve this patent (D599,372) for the design of a "graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal," but Google's request was finally approved yesterday. The company already owned a patent for its search results pages. In addition, Google also received a patent for a server-based spellchecker yesterday, as well as another one for "collaborative web page authoring."

We live in an age when success of innovation is mixed with unprecedented failures. On one hand we're reinventing the web, fighting for a greener future and building genomix. On the other there are housing bubbles, credit crises and war.

The technology patent crisis is important to our future. For decades the patent law served its purpose. Inventors used copyrights, trademarks and patents to protect their work and launch their innovations. But today's technology intellectual property system is a failure - unable to keep up with the speed of innovation, it's fallen apart.

GraphOn, which considers itself a "leading worldwide developer of server-based application publishing and Web-enabling software solutions," today announced that it is suing Google for infringing on four of GraphOn's patents. According to the complaint (embedded below), Google Base, AdWords, Blogger, Sites, and YouTube allegedly infringe on GraphOn's patent for a "unique method of maintaining an automated and network-accessible database" - a patent that is so broad, it basically covers the complete Internet as we know it today.