Not such a bad thing. Each rejection results in a narrowing of the scope and claims of the patent. The resulting claims that are granted will be far narrower than scope of the original specification.
You're talking about a non-final rejection (where some, but not all, claims are rejected), which is helpful, yes.
In Facebook's case, though—see above—there were two final rejections. A final rejection happens when all the claims are invalidated, so your submission is now vacuous.
No. A rejection on any claim can be made final after it’s gone through two “rounds,” i.e., the attorney has argued it twice (more or less). Most non-final rejections also address all the claims. There isn’t really a difference in degree or “finality” between a “non-final” and “final” rejection, despite the name! Just pay a fee for a continuation and you can argue your final rejection again.
> Why can't a lawsuit be made immediately by owners of prior art (and I'm guessing HN, Reddit both have prior art around this..)
It's called an IPR, an inter partes review [0] in the USPTO. Most potential challengers, though, are likely to save their ammunition for if and when they get sued on the patent. (And they might quietly let Facebook know they have prior art, so as to discourage FB from getting aggressive — FB might want its patent to remain officially valid, so as to be able to continue to rattle its saber at others, instead of having invalidity officially confirmed.)
Overcoming a "final" rejection can be as simple as moving a sentence from one of your dependent claims into an independent one. It doesn't necessarily mean every single claim is utterly un-patentable.
Obligatory warning: I'm not a patent lawyer but I've responded to both final and non-final office actions, eventually getting a patent
Hint: Just read the claims. Skip right to them, and ignore everything else. The claims are effectively the legal part, the pretty pictures and verbiage that usually precede them are essentially useless (and sometimes have little to do with what is being claimed).
> 1. A method comprising: receiving a comment from a posting user of a social networking system, the comment posted on a page within the social networking system; determining, by a processor, that the comment includes proscribed content; and responsive to the determination: identifying users of the social networking system who are connected to the posting user in the social networking system with a specified connection type, wherein the specified connection type is a one-to-one friend connection; determining, by the processor, a social networking system audience for the comment without input from the posting user, the processor determining the social networking system audience before providing the comment for display; and displaying the comment to the audience by: formatting the page including the comment to the posting user, and formatting the page not including the comment to users of the social networking system accessing the page who are not connected to the posting user with the specified connection type.
This sounds like it's not exactly shadow banning; your direct friends can still see your comment. I'm vaguely aware that they have special comment sections on "public" pages, articles, etc, that filter the giant thread down to stuff your friends actually wrote. I'm guessing that at some point, if you were banned from the page/etc, then your friends also couldn't see what you wrote. If that's true, then this is a little nicer to the banned user than a shadowban.
> * I'm guessing that at some point, if you were banned from the page/etc, then your friends also couldn't see what you wrote. If that's true, then this is a little nicer to the banned user than a shadowban.*
More importantly, it's more effective because it's less likely to be detected.
It still shouldn't be patentable because there's prior art involving a bunch of systems with various forms of audience selection such that how to implement this specific set of audience selection rules is obvious to most software developers. Patents cover how, not what, and they do not cover inventions whose implementation is obvious to most experts in the field.
> and they do not cover inventions whose implementation is obvious to most experts in the field
This is (ahem) patently not true; there are plenty of patents whose implementation is incredibly obvious. Insultingly obvious. As in, "Did that company try to patent string comparison?"
Look up the "standard network byte order" patent, for instance. It's now expired and was never enforced. The friend-of-a-friend who got that patent was heard to exclaim "I can't believe they gave that patent to me!", which should tell you a lot about the quality of the patent industry then -- IMHO it hasn't changed for the better.
To be clear, I'm talking about what the law specifies, not what actually happens. I know a great many patents are issued for things that are obvious, for which there is prior art, or that do not adequately describe a how.
They should not be, and somebody should probably be lobbying congress to address the patent office not being sufficiently strict.
"A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained [...] if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains."
Oh, I agree with you. It's just not how the patent industry actually works.
I'm not entirely sure why, but there appear to be perverse or at least badly aligned incentives for patent examiners, and it would appear they only look for prior art in specific locations, and these aren't the ones that the industry uses.
So you get situations like someone getting a patent for putting structures on multiple lists at a time (e.g., a lookup list, and an LRU replacement list, and maybe a list for keeping track of locks) and this is something that people have been doing since rocks were young, but some nincompoop at OraGooSoftBook got a patent on it because these structures appear in OS textbooks or maybe Knuth and not anything the examiner encountered in law school, or any legal publications. And now FaceGooSoft has a legal lock on code you wrote (hey, you did diligently read all the patents relevant to your industry before you wrote a single line, just like everybody else does right?).
