In early April, Facebook issued a countersuit against Yahoo. Facebook says that Yahoo infringed on 10 patents owned by the social network. That countersuit was about a month after Yahoo had originally filed a lawsuit against Facebook. Yahoo, in its lawsuit, claimed that Facebook infringed on its patent for its messaging, customization, privacy, ad network and social networking as a whole.
Yahoo filed on Friday its response to the counterclaim of Facebook. Yahoo says that eight of the 10 patents that Facebook cited in its filing, were acquired over the last five months. Therefore, Yahoo concluded that most, if not all, of the patents in question were acquired by the social networking site for the sole purpose of retaliation against Yahoo.
Yahoo also said, “The patents cover products where there is little or no public information available.” Therefore, Facebook had either unlawfully acquired confidential information of Yahoo’s or it has based its case on just assumptions, conjecture and unsupported inferences of how Yahoo’s products function. In fact, said Yahoo, many of the applications of the patents predate Facebook’s existence.
Facebook said in a statement that they are perplexed by the erratic actions of Yahoo and disagree with the new claims and will continue defending themselves vigorously.
Yahoo says that counsel for both of the companies agreed to meet about issues of intellectual property with one another before either one of the two companies filed anything. Yahoo says Facebook did not notify Yahoo about any alleged infringement of patents and Facebook did not ever attempt to resolve the alleged infringement of its patents prior to entering into litigation.
