Meta sued over Facebook’s content sharing system
Meta Platforms has been accused of patent infringement over its use of a system to create and disseminate content on its social media platform, Facebook.
Delaware-based tech company Virtual Creative Artists filed the complaint at the US District Court for the Western District of Texas on March 3, 2022.
The dispute concerns an invention relating to the creation and distribution of media content, and its creation of content based upon submissions received electronically.
According to the filing, at the time of the original invention in 1998, there was an internet-centric problem that required a technical solution—how to develop a computer system that would allow remote contributors of electronic content to share and collaborate their content to develop new media content.
Visual Creative Artists holds that it owns the patent, US number 9,501,480, and its predecessor patent, US number 10,339,576, which both cover this invention.
The filing held that Facebook is a computer-based system comprising an electronic media submissions server subsystem with one or more data processing apparatus and an electronic media submissions database.
This system, argued the lawsuit, is configured to receive electronic media submissions from many submitters over a public network, and this database further stores data identifying the submitter and data indicating content for each electronic media submission.
Virtual Creative Artists contended that Meta had directly infringed claim 1 of the ‘576 patent in Texas, and elsewhere in the US by employing this particular invention on its Facebook platform.
According to the company, the patents-in-suit require that the content be generated in a specific way by applying an electronic filter to a plethora of electronic media submissions stored on one or more databases.
“This allows automatic generation of multimedia content in a much quicker and easier fashion based on specific user criteria. There is nothing abstract about this very particular, unconventional, and non-routine system for the generation of multimedia content as specifically claimed and there is no risk of preempting creating and distribution contention generally, or even within the context of the internet,” insisted the lawsuit.
The company further held that it has been damaged as a result of Meta’s infringing conduct, and that it is owed damages in an amount that adequately compensates for this contravention of its IP rights.
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