The Phoenix has another patent; Facebook not first to feel Mindich wrath

In addition to the patent used by Phoenix subsidiary Tele-Publishing, Inc. to sue Facebook this week, the company has a patent (issued in 2000) for a method and apparatus for matching registered profiles.

And in 2005, Tele-Publishing sued several alternative weeklies across the country for allegedly violating both of these patents. The issue never got to a jury because the newspapers, in Washington, Chicago and Sacramento, settled the matter by signing a licensing deal with Tele-Publishing (here's the consent decree).

Here's the abstract:

A system of matching a first user with at least one other user of the system by comparing criteria data of the first user with characteristic data of the at least one other user and criteria data of the at least one other user with characteristic data of the first user. The characteristic and criteria data can be obtained via the Internet, and more specifically through a series of web site screens that prompt the user for characteristic and preference data. The system performs the comparison of the respective characteristic and criteria data to provide a list of matches to the first user. The first user is furnished with information that allows the first user to contact the other users for which a match has been found.

Hmm, sounds just like what happens every time I log into LinkedIn: I get a list of other users whom I might be suited to become best buds with because of where I worked or what interests I have. Or the MySpace search engine that lets you find people like you within 5 miles of your address. And wouldn't that be something to see Team Mindich take on Murdoch?

Still, why didn't the Tele-Publishing cite this patent in its suit against Facebook? Possibly, as more-awake-than-me Ron Newman notes, the patent refers repeatedly to "newspapers," which Facebook obviously isn't.

Oh, the Phoenix has four other patents, but they're written too specifically about serving up personal ads to be used in lawsuits against every social-networking site on earth.