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Google and Facebook Slapped with Patent Lawsuit

Google and Facebook were recently slapped with a lawsuit by a New York-based company for patent infringement, according to a news report on Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek.

The company is Wireless Ink Corp, which runs the Winksite service. In the complaint, filed Tuesday at the Federal Court in Manhattan, the company alleges that a patent regarding “ways of offering content that is accessible by mobile devices” was infringed by Facebook Mobile and Google Buzz. While the patent was only granted last October, the application was made public for the first time in 2004, according to the complaint.

Wireless Ink is seeking “cash compensation and a court order to prevent further use of its invention.”

The software maker, based in East Islip, New York, “develops Web sites that can be made available over wireless devices and has more than 75,000 registered users” according to its lawyer, Jeremy Pitcock.

According to the report, a spokesperson for Google, Andrew Pederson, said that the Internet search giant was reviewing the complaint and that it had no comments to give at this time. The same thing holds true for Facebook; a spokesperson for the company revealed that it is also reviewing the complaint at this time.

This is not something new for Facebook, which already has a couple of patent infringement cases pending. One was filed against it by a Boston company called Tele-Publishing Inc. regarding patent infringement over “a method of providing a personal page”. The other case was filed by the owner of a Japanese social networking site, Mekiki Co., for alleged infringement of patents “related to ways to identify ‘friends’ through existing contacts.”