Online social networking heavyweight Facebook has, yet again, been tagged with criminal charges, this time for violating two registered patents from two separate companies. According to the charges against Facebook, the site is in violation of patents for providing “personal pages” and for tracking the relationships between people.

Boston-based Tele-Publishing Inc., a company known for providing personals services for newspapers since the 1980′s, is currently pursuing a claim that Facebook has violated its patent for “providing a personal page”. A separate company, Japan-based Mekiki Co Ltd., is also concurrently suing Facebook for violating three of their U.S. patents filed as a “human relationships registering system”.

According to Ars Technica, Tele-Publishing Inc. currently holds 2001 U.S. Patent #6,253,216 entitled “Method and Apparatus For Providing a Personal Page”. While there are no explicit details provided of the said patent, Ars Technica comments that the patent is “generic enough that it honestly could apply to any social networking service or other website that allows the creation of a profile page”.

Mekiki Co Ltd., on the other hand, currently holds 2005 U.S. Patent #6,879,985, along with 2009 U.S. Patents #7,493,342 and #7,496,603. These three patents essentially describe a social relationships system based on a call-and-response mechanism: a system that is currently in use with most social networking sites, like MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn.

Both the Tele-Publishing and Mekiki criminal suits mention no other social networking site aside from Facebook, but if they manage to win court rulings in favor of their respective companies, then they would have the leverage to target other similar sites.

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