San Diego – Social media website Twitter is being sued by VS Technologies for infringing on its “309 patent” which it describes as a “method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people.” Twitter’s micro logging site attracts users who want to follow every ‘Tweet’ by famous celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian.
The complaint says, “As it pertains to this lawsuit, very generally speaking, the ‘309 Patent’ discloses methods and systems for creating interactive, virtual communities of people in various fields of endeavor wherein each community member has an interactive, personal profile containing information about that member.”
VS Technologies alleges that it has been damaged by Twitter’s misconduct and is seeking monetary compensation. Many in the tech world are calling the plaintiff a patent troll (The lawyer in this case appears to bear the same name as the patent owner).
This reminds us a little of the legal woes of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was sued for stealing the idea for Facebook.com. That suit led to a $65 million settlement, so clearly there is money to be made suing social networks.