Fuckery afoot at the US Patent Office…run by Serco?
Excerpt from interview with Michael McKibben, CEO, Leader Technologies
"How is the court case with Facebook going? What did they steal from you?
The engine running Facebook is our invention. Essentially, everything a Facebook user does uses our invention. For example, the tagging of a photo on a friend’s profile. Also, the entire Facebook API engine to build third party apps is our conception and patent. What seems so commonplace now was impossible in the prior files and folders Windows and Apple worlds. We changed the paradigm.
Facebook was found guilty on 11 of 11 counts of infringing our U.S. Patent No. 7,139,761 by a jury after a two-day battle of experts—four university computer science professors, two for us and two for them.
In addition, despite Facebook’s global call for hackers to feed them prior art to prove we were not innovative, they failed to prove that any prior art existed. Despite Facebook’s guilty ruling, the federal district court ruled in favor of Facebook anyway—citing an obscure law called on-sale bar (that we tried to sell the invention too soon).
Facebook presented no hard evidence of the on-sale bar accusation, and instead put forward attorney-fabricated evidence that the judge shockingly affirmed.
Our first clue that something was amiss came when the magistrate judge, an Obama nominee, replaced the 25-year veteran judge on our case just one month before trial. His first act was to allow Facebook to add the on-sale bar claim.
We only discovered years later that President Obama's Justice Department adviser on this nomination was a partner at Facebook's law firm. The new judge simultaneously blocked us from conducting additional discovery on this new accusation. So we were obstructed from defending ourselves.
That judge was then confirmed to his judgeship one week after our trial. We didn’t have notice regarding their new claim and had no opportunity to conduct discovery and get expert testimony to refute it. Without expert testimony on software matters, other evidence is pointless, yet that judge broke all the rules to affirm it anyway.
We appealed to the three-judge Federal Circuit appeals court in Washington D.C. That court ignored well-settled precedent that would have been favorable to us and refused to reverse the lower court. They even timed several of their rulings to coincide with key Facebook IPO announcements.
Not even that court could affirm the lower court’s opinion from legal precedent, so they fabricated new evidence and argument in the secrecy of judges’ chambers to justify not ruling against Facebook. Then, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear our petition.
As if this were not enough, investigators are finding intimate ties among Facebook’s law firms, the White House, the Judicial branch, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and certain members of the Senate and Congress. Even the Patent Office started a Facebook page during our proceedings and encouraged its 10,000 employees to “like” it and visit daily.
The Patent Office is currently attempting an unprecedented third reexamination of our patent to try and kill it by administrative fiat. They assigned a patent judge and director previously employed by two Facebook stakeholders, IBM and Microsoft, despite the fact that our claims have been affirmed three times previously.
Investigations into the judges' financial disclosures reveal that all of the judges in our case hold large amounts of stock in Facebook interests. According to U.S. law, a judge is not allowed to hold even one share of stock in a company that would bias his or her impartiality.
Recently, direct relationships have been uncovered among Faceboook, the judges in our case, key beneficiaries in the 2008 bank bailout and green energy stimulus, and the technologists behind HealthCare.gov.
To quote Alice in Wonderland, the Leader v. Facebook circumstances just get “curiouser and curiouser.”