Wait…really? Did you read that right? Yes, you did. Right now a company named VS Technologies is suing Twitter, alleging that it infringes on a patent—US patent no. 6,408,309. This patent, according to the title, defines “[a] Method and system for creating an interactive virtual community of famous people,” which seems like a subset of Twitter from the sound of it.

Much like the folks over at TechCrunch, I’m going to go out on a very, very thick limb and call VS Technologies a patent troll.

Straight from the documents:

“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.”

For reasons unknown, the company was awarded the patent back in 2002. Since I can’t find any information or website about the company, it appears like they did absolutely nothing productive with their ‘invention’, and thus I’m declaring it a YAPT (Yet Another Patent Troll).

VS Technologies is asking for damages to be paid, which, and I quote, should adequately compensate the company “for Defendant’s infringement, which by law cannot be less than would constitute a reasonable royalty for the use of the patented technology, together with interest and costs as fixed by this Court”.

Yet Another Patent Troll (YAPT). I really like that as an insult for this sort of behavior. File a vague patent using the new, overworked US Patent Office, see someone else doing something similar (or something that your patent might have been a subset of by design.) This patent really does not impress me. Twitter is a virtual community of famous people in the same way that Facebook and MySpace are virtual communities of famous people—they’re virtual communities that famous people came to. Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace didn’t set themselves up to become only for famous people and it’s unreasonable to believe that this patent would end up covering this sort of behavior. In fact, famous people came to Twitter because everyone was using Twitter.

VS Technologies didn’t invent anything as much as guess at the future of the Internet and then decided to use patent law to claim-jump what is essentially International Waters or at least a concept that must emerge from social phenomena.

I hope that when the Twitter lawyers write their brief to the court dismissing the lawsuit they start it with, “Really?”