Web search giant Yahoo!’s patent lawsuit against Facebook, reported by AllThingsD on Monday, has more than a whiff of desperation, according to commentators in the new media sphere. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Creative Commons)

Yahoo is suing Facebook over 10 patents just as the social networking company is preparing to become a publicly traded company, a particularly vulnerable time for a business. Facebook reportedly called the legal action "puzzling." 

As AllThingsD reports, it has echoes of a suit Yahoo! brought against mega-competitor Google in 2002.

As entrepreneur and blogger Brad Feld notes on Business Insider, the patent issue has the "same polarizing dynamic" as SOPA/PIPA, the now-mordent twin bills that were aimed at stopping illegal file sharing.

For a taste of that dynamic, here's a chunk of analysis from Wired's Andy Baio:

I’m no fan of Facebook, but this is a deplorable move. It’s nothing less than extortion, expertly timed during the SEC-mandated quiet period before Facebook’s IPO. It’s an attack on invention and the hacker ethic.

Upping the ante, prominent venture capital blogger Fred Wilson furiously calls the patents a "crock of shit":

But worse, Yahoo! has broken ranks and crossed the unspoken line which is that web companies don't sue each other over their bogus patent portfolios. I don't think there's a unique idea out there in the web space and hasn't been for well over a decade. Pretty much everything useful is based on prior art going back before the commercial web existed.  

Paid Content has a roundup of the 10 patents in dispute. For the sake of context, Yahoo has 3,300 published patents while Facebook has 160, according to Reuters.

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