Zuckerberg's First Patent Accepted


Zuckerberg's First Patent Accepted

Bangalore: The first ever patent that Mark Zuckerberg filed has finally been accepted.

The co-founder of the multibillion dollar social network platform; Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has got approval for his very first patent after initial rejections. U.S. Patent 8,225,376 titled ‘Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary” was filed back in July 2006 when Facebook was still budding as a social network and was available only for college students.

The U.S. Patent and Trade Mark Office approved the patent crediting Mark Zuckerberg and former Facebook executive Chris Kelly that covers ways of accessing user profile and selecting different privacy options much like the way we can hide our private information from certain contacts. The patent is for

“A system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary is provided. The present invention provides a system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary. A profile for a user is generated. One or more privacy setting selections are received from the user associated with the profile. The profile associated with the user is updated to incorporate the one or more privacy setting selections. A privacy summary is then generated for the profile based on the one or more privacy setting selections”

The patent office was not impressed at first from the invention and considered it obvious because of which Mark had to endure rejections. It is only now that he has got the approval for his patent after re-filing the case. This is not the first approval he has got but has around 8 U.S. patents under his name. Mark had re-filed his first patent applciation just before Facebook released its IPO and thus it signifies its importance before Facebook enters the more dangerous world of ugly patent disputes.

One of Zuckerberg’s patents has earlier been used to counter sue Yahoo Inc when Yahoo had filed a suit against Facebook for infringement of 10 patents. Both the companies since then have settled the matter without any money being exchanged. Facebook also declared that it will pay nearly $550 million dollar to Microsoft for the patents it has recently acquired from AOL.