Is the social software playing field in danger of ludicrous patent infringement lawsuits in the near future? Today, I noticed the very ubiquitous social networking site, Friendster, has the phrase “All rights reserved. Patent Pending.” next to its copyright. “You can’t be serious!” I thought… so I decided to look further, and lo and behold, I find that social networking companies have been doling out the bucks for patents and would-be-patents in this area. Perhaps I should not be surprised, but for example:

• Spoke Software, a company focusing on the enterprise networking space, in September announced that it had a portfolio of 15 patents pending (source)
• Sixdegrees.com sold its “social networking” patent for $700k to the people behind Tribe and LinkedIn (both of whom, interestingly enough, were early investors in Friendster).

Granted these announcements took place back in 2003 so it has been quiet on this front for some time. However, I truly wonder if we will be seeing the same sad stories that we’ve seen with e-commerce patents and law-suits surrounding the online “shopping cart.” Patent trolls (which I hope none of these companies are) only inhibit innovation, and the big losers will be all the end-users. Patents in the realm of software goods need to tailored appropriately or all of us, as entrepreneurs and end-users, will be at the mercy of greedy hands.

Hopefully with so many of the web apps around today having some sort of a social aspect to them, these patents will be a non-issue. Sites like del.icio.us, flickr, 43things have done a tremendous job in organizing people in various forms of community and network, and it’d be a damn shame if these products could not exist without licensing so called social networking patents.

We’ve linked this before, but it is worth a read for anyone curious to learn more: Patent Absurdity