A report from TechCrunch indicates that chances are bright that professional social networking site LinkedIn has bought some key patents from Digg, just before it was taken over by Betaworks. Though nothing can be said about this on a confirmed level at this point of time but efforts are being made to get confirmation on this matter. However, coming down to patents that may have been bought by LinkedIn may sum up to something around 15 for nearly $4 million. One of the important patents that is believed to have been bought by LinkedIn includes the “click a button to vote up a story” functionality, which would certainly be useful for any social media property — both for integration into its own services and through licensing deals. Now that the Digg has been taken over by Betaworks, all those patents will be licensed out to the company for use in the formation of new cloud-bases Digg and News.me. If TechCrunch’s report is to be believed then the patent sale took place at the time when Digg faked a deal to bring its 15-employee engineering staffers over to the Washington Post Company back in May. That is believed to have been closed at $12 million. At the same time because there is no confirmation about this deal, we will have to wait till any official announcements are made.
