Facebook and eBay are heading back into court for violation of patents or contract along with other companies such as Google and Apple - but not with each other. Patent violations end up in court allot against major companies because the become to big and have money.

Today Facebook was served with a temporary restraining order by a New York Web Designer who has claimed to own 84% of the company based on a April 2003 contract. This contract aparently states that the designer would receive $1,000 and 50% stake in to the site as a work for hire contract. The site that was design was the starting point of Facebook.com (theFacebook.com). If the Web Designer wins his case he would be entitled to an estimate of $4 to $5 billion according to it's current estimated value. This is the second case of it's kind as the last one was settled out of court for a estimated $65 million. If these cases are true then it looks that Facebook.com need to finish pain it's debt to the original developers.

Moving on to eBay, XPRT Ventures filed patent violation against PayPal (eBay) and seek damages of $3.8 billion. They claim that eBay has violated six shared patents between XPRT and PayPal by integrating unauthorized and automated payment system into their auction system. PayPal, as well as other eBay subsidiaries BillMeLater, Shopping.com, and StubHub, were also named as defendants in the lawsuit.

As patents have become a major issue in recent time - people sit on these things until someone comes up and unawarely uses them to become big. At the point they become big the patent owners like to discredit them, in most cases and file law suits. We are all about protecting the patent owners as well for it was their original design but can there be a better way of doing this.