This article was published on October 3, 2012

Facebook and LinkedIn getting sued by Bascom Research over patent infringement


Facebook and LinkedIn getting sued by Bascom Research over patent infringement

Bascom Research, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Lexington Technology Group that specializes in software development applying “computational and data structures to complex data sets in the medical field”, today filed a lawsuit against several Facebook and LinkedIn, in addition to several other companies. Bascom is saying that the defendants have engaged in patent infringement that they claim was patented in early 2001 “long before the advent of Facebook, LinkedIn and other social and business networks…”

According to the release, Thomas Bascom, who apparently started the company, independently developed what it calls pivotal technology for use in the telecom and national security sectors and had been commercialized in Bascom’s previous company LinkSpace.

The four patents that are the subject of the lawsuit are:

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,111,232 (“the ‘232 Patent”), entitled Method and system for making document objects available to users of a network
  • U.S. Patent No. 7,139,974 (“the ‘974 Patent”), entitled FRAMEWORK FOR MANAGING DOCUMENT OBJECTS STORED ON A NETWORK
  • U.S. Patent No. 7,389,241 (“the ‘241 Patent”), entitled METHOD FOR USERS OF A NETWORK TO PROVIDE OTHER USERS WITH ACCESS TO LINK RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DOCUMENTS
  • U.S. Patent No. 7,158,971 (“the ‘971 Patent”), entitled METHOD FOR SEARCHING DOCUMENT OBJECTS ON A NETWORK

Other companies being sued by Bascom Research includes Novell, Jive Software, and BroadVision.

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