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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Foursquare was hardly the first startup to do this:

Dodgeball was created by Crowley (one of the founders of Foursquare) in 2000. Loopt was founded in 2005. Whrrl, buzzd, and brightkite were all founded in 2007. There are probably dozens of other examples.

EDIT: Had the wrong date for Dodgeball. Thanks Batsu!

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I had this idea in 2003 and have the Internet archive Wayback machine link to prove it: http://web.archive.org/web/20030706235741/http://gadgeteer.o...

I did this as a defensive publication for just such a case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_publication

I love that you did that. What I would love even more is a project where people just post descriptions of ideas, publicly, so that a year or two down the line, patents can be blocked. What a service to the world: force companies to only get patents on TRULY innovative, non-obvious stuff, whilst the rest of the startup scene can take these admittedly obvious features and focus on executing them damn well without the fear of patent litigation.

Close - Dodgeball was created in 2000 and acquired by Google in 2005. In 2009, they discontinued Dodgeball in favor of Google Latitude.

It looks as though prior art existed well before Facebook even existed. I don't think anyone has anything to worry about.

What about the cost of simply defending against a lawsuit?

http://www.inventionstatistics.com/Patent_Litigation_Costs.h...

If it's not enforceable, why the hell is it granted? That's total bullshit, seriously.

Because the patent system in the US, particularly software patent, is entirely broken: http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/patent-office-a...

Ah, ok - I don't know the history of the space that well. Either way it's a god-awful patent, but especially with clear prior art.

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