Yahoo: Patent Opportunist

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Josh Constine:

After years of positive relations, friendly blog posts, and referral traffic, Yahoo may have just been biding its time waiting declare war on Facebook. Today it suddenly accused its former ally of infringing on 10-20 of its patents. It demands a settlement from Facebook or it says it will sue.

The attack comes at a particularly vulnerable time for Facebook, during the quiet period leading up to its IPO. Facebook could be forced to license the patents or settle with Yahoo by paying out pre-IPO stock, the same way Google was coerced into giving Yahoo 2.7 million shares in patent settlement before the search giant’s 2004 IPO.

Shrewd move by Yahoo, but surely this pattern will eventually be noticed and Yahoo won't be able to exploit it's relationships any more. One day they'll have to come up with a non-patent-troll business plan to just admit that they lost.

Facebook: The Internet's Big Brother

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Nancy Messieh:

In September, Facebook confirmed that user-information was being collected from third party sites, even when logged out of their accounts, but that it was in the process of fixing the issue. That hasn’t stopped the lawsuits from raining down on the social network.

Anyone who thinks they're anonymous on the internet is a fool.

Ben Brooks on Facebook

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Ben Brooks agrees with Paul Robert Lloyd's well-reasoned argument that Facebook has become arrogant, then simply arrests:

[S]o too has Google, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM.

That's a lot of people to throw on the pile with no rationale behind it. Not saying he's wrong necessarily, but you need to back that kind of a statement up.