Presidential candidates face patent lawsuit for using Facebook

Patent law is a notoriously dry subject, and it's almost never the subject of debate in presidential campaigns. One patent holder has found an ingenious method for raising the profile of the issue: he sued Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich for patent infringement.

The plaintiff runs Everymd.com, a website that claims, not very plausibly, to be "the easiest way to contact your doctor online." The complaint says that Everymd "provides home pages for over 300,000 member doctors" and "allows patients to obtain information about, send messages to, and submit comments about those doctors." There's no indication of how many of those 300,000 doctors signed up for this "service," or how many patients use it. Still, the site's owner, Frank Weyer, claims to have invented the concept of "providing individual online presences for each of a plurality of members of a group of members." And he believes that 4 million Facebook business account holders, including at least three major presidential candidates, are guilty of infringing his patent.