There's a patent that's been granted and now owned by LinkedIn, that appears to cover any and all permutations of a computer automatically validating something. Patents US20130158984A1, US20130151240A1, US20130198196A1, granted to Lucas Meyer, covers the computer process of: Monitoring information > Processing information > Fact Checking the Information > Indicating the Status of Information. They go on for 50 some pages each, essentially laying claim to any and all permutations of a computer automatically validating information. Is this allowed? I'm a small time coder/inventor/politics junkie that wants to make a very targeted fact checking app for political races. I thought patents were supposed to have specificity. From what I can tell, this patent prevents me, or anyone except LinkedIn, from using computers to check information automatically. Which seems crazy. Can you help me understand if I'm missing something here? Or if there's something that renders this patent challengeable. This isn't my strongest area of competency. I defer to you.
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1You have listed published applications, not issued patents. A published application starts with the four digit year. An issued US utility patent is a seven digit number. The claims listed in the published application are often the broadest set of claims that they could hope to get. The patent prosecution process may not allow broad claims or may require substantial limits be added to the claims. You can see how these are proceeding by using USPTO PUBLIC PAIR including rejections and amendments and will allow you to see if any of these have been abandoned.– Kevin E FlynnCommented Jul 15, 2016 at 18:14
2 Answers
I only quickly reviewed the patents. The applications you cited are now issued patents: US9087048B2, US9015037B2, US9176957B2. They seem to be specifically aimed at automatic fact checking of posted or broadcast information. I would gather to reduce the amount of fake news. Read the claims of the linked documents and if you still think they are too broad, you could ask a prior art request question. They do sound sort of broad, but I'd need to read the specification to see if they defined some of their terms more specifically. In any case, this isn't my area of expertise.
It is quite a comprehensive patent that if practiced surely depends on teachings of prior art:
I suggest you reword your question and add the tag "prior art request"
such as this:
