Indian Startup Lifeblob accuses Facebook of copying its feature | Hacker News Reader

Indian Startup Lifeblob accuses Facebook of copying its feature

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13 pointstechhacker10 comments

I copy features from other sites all the time. If you have a good idea, don't be surprised if others replicate it, especially if it's technically easy.

What do you expect? Facebook will see it, say "That's cool!" and then offer you a 20M buyout? Hell no, they'll just take a week, build it in-house, and move on to the next feature.

Lifeblob is an Indian company, even if they had a patent on this, it won't work against Facebook, which is a US company (until they have a US patent and Facebook is using same technique). Also, copyright infringement won't work until Facebook uses the same code.

Moreover, Lifeblob has shot in their foot with this. Lifeblob's content is hosted in US (Softlayer as host). If Facebook gets a patent on the recommendation engine they and Lifeblob is using, they can issue a takedown notice to Lifeblob from american servers.

Actions like Lifeblob's only end up destroying the web ecosystem.

Re patents: If FB really did essentially 'copy' LB's feature (as opposed to independently inventing it without having first known about it), then they wouldn't be able to get a US patent. See 35 USC 102(f) at http://goo.gl/36yy.

Even if FB did independently invent the feature, LB's US-hosted and US-available feature might count as "prior art" that knocked out FB's ability to get a patent.

Of course, much depends on just what FB would try to claim.

LB is an Indian company. If a US company and Indian company invent the same thing regardless of chronological order and if each company takes patents in their respective country, this can prohibit each company to operate in other's country.

But you may be right. LB being hosted in US might well be qualified as 'operating in US', which might prevent FB getting patent in US.

In any case, if LB was so paranoid about someone stealing their 'photo recommendation engine', they must have at the very least filed patent pending applications in India and US.

LB's outburst suggest they are thinking of this as an infringement of some sort, but these things won't work in web startups. How many countries will anyone run around getting patents to make sure nobody else does it? Maybe, in future we have better governing stuff for the web,

Business is NOT an exam. You can't call out people for "copying". Where did Lifeblob get it's "photo sharing" idea from? Nah, can't be Flickr.

I wrote similar code for my photo sharing startup at least 5 years ago. Showing a photo's detail page and related photos based on tag and dates from that photo is a fairly trivial task. I really don't see the big deal; surely others have done something similar. They just weren't Facebook!

Now if someone had taken their name, changed a letter, then their logo and made it 3D, and them built a big brand around it, then I'd say go sue their asses off. But this? Seriously?

I find it unlikely that fb copied this feature. FB is in the content discovery game (amongst other things). Once users are sharing photos, a likely next step would be to help them discover photos from their friends and friends of friends.

It's not just fb either. The idea of finding and presenting users with associated content they would find interesting is a staple feature of most social sites

It's unreasonable for Lifeblob to say anything remotely negative about Facebook copying their feature, when it's obvious from Lifeblob's UI that most of their ideas have come from your typical social networking site. They even use Facebook Connect!

Good; I hope Facebook copies more useful features.

<downvote me>Facebook in it's entirety was copied from ConnectU.</downvote me>.

But back to the point of copying it's feature of associating related photos. Everyone copies from everyone else, or putting it politely as "getting inspiration from". This is the reality, no point whining about it. Take it as a compliment and move on.

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