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Never in human history have ideas been shared as fast and vast as today. An interconnected network of 2.5 billion people around the world are connecting to share ideas, and every time an idea is shared we generate opportunity for change. We’ve barely begun to understand how this impacts our lives, but it’s obvious that the rate of change in the world has accelerated. And we’re not satisfied yet. Google Glass is just one vision on how we can bring idea sharing more central to our lives. It used to be normal for business to make five-year projections. Today it is increasingly meaningless. But if there is less need for long-term projections then there is more need for creativity.

Companies that are succeeding rely on creative thinking to consistently produce new ideas. Take the example of Kodak and Instagram. Kodak went bankrupt at roughly the same time that Instagram, a two-year-old company, was bought for one billion dollars. Kodak was in the image business for over a century, but they failed to see the opportunity that a 13-person team was able to seize.

Creative thinking has always been appealing, but now its impact cannot be dismissed. Creativity is becoming the single most defining characteristic of an organization’s ability to survive. We’ve moved into an idea economy where success can be very profitable and short at the same time. To be a contender, companies have to be built around idea production and guided by an actual purpose for existing.

Purpose is the cornerstone of a creative company culture. Companies like Google churn out innovative products quickly because their teams have creative freedom within a clearly defined purpose: “[T]o organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” They hire brilliant people, tell them what direction to go and let them fly.

I remember reading this article about how Google’s purpose helps the company be creative:

Google’s singular worldview sees information as a natural resource — one that should be mined and refined and sorted and universally distributed. That idea stands at the center of all Google does, unifying what can appear to be wildly disparate projects. In the end, the resources and liberty Google entrusts to its workers infuse them with a rare sense of possibility — and obligation: “Are we taking advantage of what we’ve got here?” they ask. “Are we doing enough?”

The same approach spans company size and resources — you can be a two-man team or have hundreds of people in your company. A strong sense of purpose is the tool for aligning company creativity.

The e-retailer Zappos is an example of how autonomy leads to success. The About section on Zappos.com states its purpose: “We’ve aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.” To enable this, Zappos gives call-center employees full autonomy to deliver a “wow” experience to every customer — like one customer service rep’s decision to overnight free dress shoes to the best man in a wedding. Consequently, shoppers consistently rank Zappos number one in customer service.

Purpose is also the most efficient way to decide which ideas should stay and which should go. I remember just a few months ago, Prezi had two big ideas on the table that would take the bulk of engineering time: Mobile platform development or a new feature for high-stakes presentations (like TED talks). Both were aligned with our purpose of helping people share ideas. Ultimately, we decided to develop the iPhone and iPad apps first because the ability to use Prezi on all devices would have a greater idea-sharing impact than a new feature for high-stakes presentations.

Through having a purpose and unleashing creativity, savvy companies will stay relevant longer and make themselves an attractive tribe to join. Honing in on a real purpose, born from a real need, is the best building block for a company built to last. Once that purpose is clear, creative thinking will be the key to succeeding at the current rate of change.

Peter Arvai co-founded Prezi in 2008 with Adam Somlai-Fischer and Péter Halácsy. Before co-founding Prezi, in Sweden, he founded omvard.se, a company that aggregates data on treatment outcomes for hospital patients. He also developed the world’s first mobile newsreader so people could follow TED Talks from their mobile devices.

Under the plan, filed late Tuesday, second-lien noteholders owed $375 million would get 85 percent of the new common stock in the restructured Kodak.

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The list of licensees for the patents is a dozen-long and includes not only Apple Inc. and Google Inc., but also Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and China’s Huawei Technologies.

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While the people said a deal for the patents hadn’t yet been reached, the bid puts the onetime photography icon a step closer to financing that could help it exit bankruptcy court.

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To get the financing, Kodak must sell a portfolio of 1,100 digital patents for at least $500 million, the people said. Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy protection in January, remains in discussions with a bidder group including Apple Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and patent aggregators Intellectual Ventures Management LLC and RPX Corp. on the patents, the people said. RPX declined to comment and the other companies couldn’t immediately be reached.

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The decision will cost Kodak $90 million, as the company lays off staff and writes down the value of its consumer-printing assets. It also will leave the company even smaller as it works to emerge from bankruptcy protection sometime next year.

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The foundering photography pioneer on Monday announced plans to cut an additional 1,000 jobs by year’s end, this in addition to the 2,700 jobs it has eliminated this year already as it struggles to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

After this round of cuts, Kodak, which employed about 145,000 people at its height, will employ just 13,400. And if the company doesn’t manage to sell off its portfolio of digital imaging patents for a decent sum, that number could drop lower still.

In a statement announcing today’s layoffs, Kodak said, “An analysis of further operational and workforce reductions is under way.” Helping the company in those deliberations is a new chief financial officer. Kodak has replaced CFO Antoinette McCorvey on an interim basis with Rebecca Roof, an executive from restructuring advisory outfit AlixPartners.

Kodak said on Thursday it would sell its traditional off-the-shelf print-film business and several other businesses to raise additional cash as an auction of its digital patents slogs on.

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The struggling photography pioneer, which for the past year has been gearing up to sell off some 1,100 patents as part of its effort to emerge from bankruptcy, said Thursday that it may not sell some — or all — of them, after all.

“[Kodak] has not reached a determination or agreement to sell the digital imaging patent portfolio, and may retain all or parts of it as a source of creditor recoveries in lieu of a sale if it concludes that doing so is in the best interests of the estate,” the company said in a statement.

Coming as it does on the ninth day of a patent auction that was originally scheduled to end this past Monday, Kodak’s statement suggests that the process is not going as well as it had hoped.

And, indeed, sources familiar with the auction say that bids for Kodak’s digital imaging patent portfolio thus far have come in below the $2 billion the company has been angling for. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that initial bids from the two consortiums favored to win the auction — one led by Apple, the other by Google — were only about $500 million.

How much the bids have risen since then, if they’ve risen at all, isn’t clear. Kodak says it continues to have “active discussions” with potential patent buyers, and it has extended the auction in light of them. But the company clearly hasn’t yet managed to incite the sort of Nortel-style bidding-war blowout for which it had hoped. And now, with rival bidders mulling alliances that would keep bids on the portfolio low, Kodak may have lost its chance to do so.

All the bids received for Kodak’s portfolio of 1,100 digital patents thus far were significantly below $500 million, as consortiums that include Apple Inc. and Google Inc. declined to engage in the sort of spirited bidding that drove up prices in an auction of Nortel Networks Inc. patents a year ago, the people said.

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Kodak received two bids from investor groups pitting Silicon Valley giants Apple Inc. and Google Inc. against each other ahead of an auction set for Wednesday, people familiar with the process said. The bids from the two teams came in around $150 million to $250 million, the people said.

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Late Thursday, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled that Apple has no claim to two of eight disputed patents Kodak hopes to sell at auction this month. In his ruling, Judge Allan Gropper found that Apple waited too long to raise claims of infringement on the ’218 and ’335 digital imaging patents — two of the more valuable patents in Kodak’s portfolio. Kodak’s ability to sell the assets would be “cut off” if Apple’s “unreasonably late claims” aren’t rebuffed, he wrote.

“If Apple’s claims proceed despite their unreasonably delayed commencement, Kodak might have to go back to the drawing board for ways to fund its case,” Gropper explained.

On the eight other patents at issue between the two companies, Gropper denied Kodak’s motion for summary judgment, so this wasn’t a sweeping victory. But it’s a promising turn of events for the struggling photography pioneer, which would otherwise have seen its plans for a patent sale hamstrung.

Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy protection in January, hopes to auction the ’218 and ’335 patents off, along with a thousand or so other digital-imaging patents. But Apple claims it is their true owner, and that Kodak misappropriated them when the two companies were exploring how best to commercialize Apple’s digital-camera technologies back in the early ’90s. And it has sued Kodak to stop the sale. Meanwhile, Kodak has sued Apple, accusing it of attempting to “delay and derail” its patent-sale efforts, to drive the portfolio’s value down so it can purchase it at a lower price.

What tipped me off is the price of an obscure financial instrument known as a credit default swap. You may remember them from such hits as the great mortgage meltdown of 2008. While these credit default swaps have no connection whatsoever to mortgages, they do the same thing as the swaps did in that case: They serve as insurance.

When a lender worries about the likelihood that he’s going to get repaid, he can buy insurance against the chance that the borrower defaults. That’s essentially what a credit default swap is. You buy one, and if the borrower defaults, you get paid. If the borrower doesn’t default, whoever sells the swap pockets the fee, just like an insurance company. It’s a decent business, and there’s a thriving market for credit default swaps on all kinds of debts.

Anyway, last week I pulled some data showing that the price to buy this protection on HP’s debt has gone up — way up — since this time last year. In industry shorthand, the price to buy protection on $10 million worth of HP debt for five years has been “blowing out.” (Hence the movie poster from the forgettable 1981 John Travolta movie.) Protection a year ago that cost $65,000 has gone up to $325,000, while prices on the swaps covering debt on IBM and Oracle have stayed more or less flat.

And while it has no direct bearing on HP’s finances or operations — credit default swaps are derivative instruments — they do serve as an important barometer of the mood of bond markets that trade in debt. If the price to insure against the possibility of a default, however remote, is rising, the cost to take out new debt by issuing bonds can increase, as can the cost of refinancing existing debt. And when you consider that HP has a net debt burden of about $21 billion, a small increase in the costs associated with financing it can have a direct effect on operations.

Apparently I was on to something. It turns out that the “blow out” isn’t just happening to HP’s debt, but to debts held by Dell, Xerox and Lexmark, too. Today, The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler looked at all three and saw similar pricing trends. The most extreme case was at printer maker Lexmark, where the cost of swaps on its debt have tripled to $590,000.

At a moment when other once-solid tech companies like Nokia and Eastman Kodak are in distress, more people are betting on — or insuring against — the possibility that HP, Dell, Xerox and Lexmark end up like them.

At least two groups are expected to bid on Kodak’s trove of 1,100 patents, with a bevy of technology and patent heavyweights picking sides and competing for the patents, said people familiar with the matter.

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Late Thursday, Apple’s request for a change of venue to a district court was denied on the grounds that the dispute should remain in bankruptcy court until some of its key issues are resolved. Apple had argued that bankruptcy court lacks both the authority and “necessary expertise” to handle the case, which involves a handful of Kodak digital-imaging patents of which both companies claim ownership.

Thursday’s ruling is a bit of a blow to Apple, which is hell-bent on having the rightful ownership claims at issue in the case resolved before bankruptcy proceedings conclude.

Kodak filed a complaint against the iPhone and BlackBerry makers at the U.S. International Trade Commission in early 2010, saying their devices infringed on its patent for previewing images with a digital camera. Late Friday, the commission dismissed the complaint, upholding a finding by one of its judges that the patent was invalid.

As such, the commission concluded that neither Apple nor RIM had violated trade laws that could have led to an injunction halting imports of their products. Since the patent at issue was one of Kodak’s most valuable, the ruling raises fresh questions about how much money the company, now in Chapter 11, can raise from an auction that is expected to conclude next month.

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In a lawsuit filed late Monday in U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan, Kodak accused Apple of attemping to “delay and derail” its patent-sale efforts by wrongly claiming ownership over 10 patents Kodak is peddling as part of a portfolio worth some $2 billion.

“Apple’s strategy has been to use its substantial cash position to delay as long as possible the payment of royalties to Kodak and to interfere [with the sale],” Kodak said. “Apple and FlashPoint [an Apple spinoff that is also claiming ownership] are seeking to benefit from Kodak’s difficult financial position, which will be exacerbated if the debtors cannot obtain fair value for the patents.”

Notably, Kodak has identified Apple as among the largest infringers of patents in its portfolio, and a potential purchaser of them, as well. And now it’s implying that Apple’s intent, by asserting ownership, is to drive the patent’s value down so it can purchase it at a lower price.

Kodak, which says that the patent portfolio in question has generated billions of dollars in revenue for it over the last decade, is seeking a court order dismissing Apple’s ownership claims over the patents at issue here and putting an end to what it describes as a “public campaign to create uncertainty as to ownership of the patents.”

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On Monday, a U.S. International Trade Commission judge ruled one of Kodak’s key patents invalid, undermining the photography pioneer’s efforts to assert it against Apple and Research In Motion. In his decision, ITC Judge Thomas Pender wrote that while some Apple and RIM products did indeed violate some claims of Kodak’s 6,292,218 patent, the patent itself, which covers the ability for a digital camera to preview images on an LCD screen, is invalid.

The ’218 patent is referred to by some as the “crown jewel” of Kodak’s portfolio, so Pender’s ruling is potentially a major blow to the company, which is looking to maximize the value of its IP ahead of a bankruptcy auction. Indeed, just last week Kodak accused Apple of attempting to undermine its efforts by asserting ownership claims over the ’218 patent.

“Apple’s decision to press its ownership claims now … should be seen for what it is, namely, a ploy calculated to prevent the debtors from using the [bankruptcy] sale process to obtain a fair price for Kodak’s digital capture portfolio (or to enable Apple to buy it on the cheap and extinguish its infringement exposure),” Kodak said in court documents filed last week.

It seems now that the ploy was a wasted effort. There are few better ways of extinguishing a company’s infringement exposure than having the patent asserted against it ruled invalid. And, as RIM noted in a statement issued Monday afternoon, Pender is the second ITC judge to rule the ’218 patent invalid.

That said, Apple and RIM aren’t entirely out of the woods yet. Kodak plans to appeal Pender’s ruling to the full commission. And it says it’s confident it will prevail in the end, since the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirmed ’218’s validity in 2010.

Regardless, Pender’s ruling couldn’t come at a worse time. Sources say that Kodak has been looking to attract a stalking-horse bidder who would put down an initial offer for its patent portfolio as it gears up for its bankruptcy auction. Having the patent that’s at the center of its high-profile battle with Apple and RIM tossed aside by the ITC isn’t going to aid that effort.

At issue here is a patent covering the ability for a digital camera to preview images on an LCD screen. Apple sued Kodak over the technology, claiming that Kodak “misappropriated” it when the two companies were working together years ago. Kodak — which filed for bankruptcy in January and is looking to sell off this patent, along with a host of others, to pay off its creditors — insists that Apple’s ownership claim is “baseless.” And now it’s arguing that Apple’s intent, by alleging misappropriation, is simply to avoid paying royalty payments on it, or to drive the patent’s value down so it can purchase it at a lower price.

“Apple’s decision to press its ownership claims now … should be seen for what it is, namely, a ploy calculated to prevent the debtors from using the [bankruptcy] sale process to obtain a fair price for Kodak’s digital capture portfolio (or to enable Apple to buy it on the cheap and extinguish its infringement exposure),” Kodak said in court documents filed earlier this week, adding that Apple’s ownership claim has already been “squarely rejected” by an International Trade Commission judge.

And, to some extent, it does have a point. Apple didn’t file suit against Kodak until nine years after the patent was first issued, and decades after the two companies worked together on exploring how best to commercialize Apple’s digital camera technologies.

But then, Kodak didn’t sue Apple until 2010, amid the collapse of its finances and a looming Chapter 11 filing. So if Apple’s decision to press ownership claims nine years after the fact is a ploy, then what is Kodak’s decision to assert this patent against Apple a year ealier? A ploy to drive up the patent’s price in advance of a sale?

Just another business negotiation being carried out in the courts …

Five years ago, AllThingsD.com was launched with just a few staffers, a few stories and a whole lot of hope. Also, as it turned out, with a panoply of LOLcat photos.

The site had soft-launched a little earlier, but — officially — we opened our doors in the late evening of April 26, 2007. Walt Mossberg wrote about a Kodak printer; John Paczkowski wrote about, wait for it, Apple; and I opined on how then-Yahoo-CEO Terry Semel might save the troubled company.

The more things change …

Actually, despite the fact that we have grown hugely in both traffic and staff, and have logged almost 26,000 posts, little has changed in how ATD looks at its role in covering tech, using stringent standards of fairness, accuracy, ethics and reporting.

As I wrote back then: “That is what we will be trying to do most of the time here, attempting to figure out what is happening in the digital space and explaining it in a way that is clear and cogent.”

And, of course, have some fun doing it.

Thus, mission accomplished, and mission never accomplished, too.

Walt and I want to thank everyone, from our outstanding staff to our Dow Jones colleagues to the many companies we cover to — most of all — our readers.

There is a lot more to come going forward, and we hope to never disappoint and always delight.

And, as I also wrote back then at the dawn of AllThingsD:

“But enough looking back: On to the next thing.”

And to my amazing partner, Walt, you knew I could not resist:

If you want a quick analysis of why Facebook would pay $1 billion for popular photo-sharing service Instagram, please ignore the obvious financials that just don’t add up at all and have most of the typically unshockable digerati shocked by the sheer amount of the price.

Actually, it’s pretty simple: Photos. Photos. And, oh yes, mobile photos — lots and lots and lots of them.

Astonishingly, Facebook users already upload an average of more than 250 million images daily, making it the most popular photo-sharing service on the Web.

But it’s not the best by far and not the most mobile, which is Facebook’s biggest weakness — that has been accomplished many others, especially Instagram, the favorite of power users who scoffed at Facebook’s weak tools. (The horror of no filters!)

Now — instead of all those billions of juicy digital photos snapped by an ever-growing legion of smartphone users loading up to the beautifully designed Instagram mobile app and living on the servers of the small San Francisco-based start-up — Facebook has now captured all these memories for its massive social networking site.

And while $1 billion seems an awful lot to pay for that privilege — Twitter is quaking with “OMG!” and “Wow!” and “WTF!” tweets about the acquisition — this is apparently priceless for Facebook in a deal that went down quickly and quietly in recent weeks.

That and the fact that the huge sum prevented Instagram from being scooped up by Google.

It’s a clear signal from CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — who rules all product efforts at the company — of his intent to dominate all innovations that have to do with owning the social experience.

Because while many Instagram photos quickly made their way onto Facebook — sharing on the service, as well as on Twitter, was a big part of the app’s offering — the future of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is tied to having control over key elements of the user experience.

Of all of those — communications, status updates, content linking — it has been photos that have become perhaps the most important part of Facebook, almost since its beginnings.

Photos are what allowed Facebook to grow so quickly and what made it more than just a blue sea of text and links to consumers. Its new Timeline depends on big, pretty photos, and Facebook even recently announced that it would allow full-screen viewing of high-resolution photos on its Web site, a pricey endeavor.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that Zuckerberg would pay up for Instagram, too — he knows a good entrepreneurial success when he sees one and apparently has the power to convince start-ups that he can make their bigger dreams come true.

Whether or not Instagram ever makes money is perhaps beside the point at this moment in time, as Facebook is poised to go public at 100 times the amount it forked over for Instagram.

But that it considers such a purchase worth as much as one percent of its expected valuation says a thousands words. And most of those words are “mobile” and “photo.”

As Ben Jacobs noted on Twitter: “Kodak goes bankrupt and Instagram is worth a billion dollars. 2012, y’all.”

Indeed. And, I have no doubt if Zuckerberg could figure out a way to shove all those Kodak moments from analog snapshots onto Facebook easily, he’d have paid up for that, too.

In what is either the boldest gamble of its history or the most boneheaded, Yahoo has filed a massive patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook.

The attack by the Silicon Valley Internet icon against perhaps the most powerful consumer social networking site today — also based in tech’s heartland and also an important partner of Yahoo — is sure to be a controversial one, pitting Yahoo against a company that has surpassed it handily in recent years in regards to popularity among consumers.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles for and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology,” Yahoo’s lawsuit reads, in part.

That includes, Yahoo alleges, Facebook’s popular News Feed, advertising methods, privacy settings and more. The company adds that Facebook has been “free riding” on Yahoo’s intellectual property and that royalty payments alone will not suffice.

So what does Yahoo want for this alleged free ride? Triple damages and to enjoin Facebook from operating by using said patents.

The 19-page lawsuit over 10 patents — related to advertising, privacy, customization, messaging and social networking — comes as Yahoo is seeking to right itself under new CEO Scott Thompson.

Multiple sources said he is primarily driving this new aggressiveness from Yahoo.

Since Yahoo told the New York Times that it was considering such a move last week, the issue has been widely debated within the company, with many top techies there opposed to it, due to the company’s longstanding ethos of using patents for defense rather than offense.

Thus, the decision to move was closely held, sources said, with only Thompson and legal chief Michael Callahan largely working on it.

Still, patent lawsuits have become ever more prevalent among tech companies, as they seek to battle for advantage in a rapidly changing competitive landscape. Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are involved in several legal actions, although they are largely related to mobile technology.

Yahoo’s lawsuit is the most prominent in the social networking arena, a sector that has seen a huge explosion of late. Its timing could not be worse for Facebook, since it is in a quiet period for its upcoming IPO, which is expected to value the company at close to $100 billion.

Yahoo has done this kind of thing before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock.

Yahoo is shaking Facebook down for much more here and with much higher stakes for both companies. If successful, Yahoo could seriously damage Facebook’s initial public offering; if not, Yahoo will cement its growing reputation as a company with nothing to lose, whose value is built not on its current business, but on non-operating assets.

More importantly, at least initially, the move did nothing to boost Yahoo’s moribund shares — the stock was down about one percent to $14.49 in after-hours trading.

More to come, but here is the entire document below. The lawsuit has been filed in San Jose, Calif., federal court.

Lastly, the official PR back-and-forth:

Said Yahoo, in its statement:

“Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years, which has resulted in numerous patented inventions of technology that other companies have licensed. These technologies are the foundation of our business that engages over 700 million monthly unique visitors and represent the spirit of innovation upon which Yahoo! is built. Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court. We are confident that we will prevail.”

Facebook, obviously, disagrees, and also threw in a jab about the lack of discussions over the issue between the pair:

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation. Once again, we learned of Yahoo’s decision simultaneously with the media. We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions.”

I’ll admit to also being puzzled about the strategery here, but I am sure there will be much more to come.

Until then, read on:

Complaint

And here is what I wrote last week on the subject:

Apparently, Yahoo’s new motto: If you can’t beat ‘em — and it can’t — sue ‘em.

That would be Yahoo — the perpetual 98-pound weakling of the Internet these days — threatening powerful Facebook, which had cleanly bested it by attracting hordes of users with a plethora of popular products and services.

Yahoo has already lost its audience to Facebook, which was most recently followed by its frittering away a commanding lead in display advertising, too.

That would also be the Yahoo whose most recent success in improving its increasingly tenuous connections with customers was, in fact, by deeply integrating Facebook’s social hooks into its Web properties.

That would be the Yahoo which has failed time and again to innovate its own offerings so drastically over the years that it has now apparently decided that its first and best strategic move under Thompson’s rule is a shakedown.

Such a cynical move on rights Yahoo has long held seems more a play for the cheap seats of Wall Street, given that the company needs to look like it is doing everything it can to turn things around right now as it faces a proxy challenge.

First, it ended difficult talks with its Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, over selling back lucrative stakes there.

Now, according to sources, Yahoo’s Thompson has actually been trying to make very nice with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — on-the-down-low chitchats that might have played a part of this latest unusual move.

At least Kodak had a good excuse. The once iconic camera company had recently been trying to take advantage of its trove of patents as a way to stave off declaring bankruptcy.

That didn’t work for Kodak, and it will also not work for Yahoo, whose only real option is to try to innovate its way out of the mess it has landed itself in.

You know, with good ideas.

Instead, the company’s leadership has opted for a road that could rain down trouble and paint Yahoo as a company bereft of talent to win any other way.

And while a range of intellectual property lawsuits have broken out all over the digital sector, involving Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others, such a strategy for Yahoo could be dangerous if it fails in its legal effort to take advantage of its 1,000-plus patents, including those related to search and advertising.

Others — including such tech luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too, so who knows where this thing will go.

Nonetheless, Yahoo has decided to emulate those companies with one of the few valuable assets it might have, waging its little war, right as Facebook is in the midst of its initial public offering period.

Yahoo has done this before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock (which it then, of course, sold too soon).

That certainly could happen here, with Yahoo managing to grab a chunk of Facebook’s pre-IPO stock.
That would mean that Yahoo’s most valuable asset would be those shares, as well as its stake in Asian companies it bought a while back for a bargain and now makes up a bulk of the company’s valuation.

As to Yahoo’s core business — investors consider it almost entirely worthless.

And let’s not forget: Facebook could also sue right back, which it very well might do. Or, perhaps, cut off agreeable ties that have aided Yahoo in recent years.

In other words, in poking Facebook, Yahoo might now learn what it is really like to be de-friended.

Judge Allan L. Gropper of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan’s rulings covered both a pending suit Apple has against Kodak over the patent, as well as another complaint it wants to bring that covers damages the company thinks it is owed since Kodak filed for Chapter 11. The pending suit in the U.S. District Court in Rochester, N.Y., had already been stopped automatically by both the International Trade Commission and bankruptcy law, but Apple sought to lift the “automatic stay” shielding Kodak from litigation so the suit could continue.

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