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Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't take a penny from Facebook. You know they will lock down any patent you create and steal your IP.

Disclosure: I worked for WhatsApp, including while owned by Facebook, and Facebook is assigned my twoish [1] patents.

Has Facebook done anything with their patents? I know they had an early spat with Yahoo and got access to a bunch to help with that, and have since put more effort into building a portfolio, but I don't recall seeing anything in the way of litigation. I know there's been issues with clauses in licenses, though.

[1] I've read both patents, I'm the only inventor, and I can't tell the difference between the two.

I also have three identical seeming patents. I was also confused, so I asked my patent examiner friend, and this was his response. I assume the same applies to you:

"You have one patent family with three patents in it. The lowest number is the parent, it was first to grant. Before it was granted a continuation was filed - they wanted to claim some shit that you disclosed in the parent but didn't claim, and it got granted. Before that one got granted a second continuation was filed to claim some shit that was disclosed in the first continuation. Sometimes that comes from realizing something else in the patent specification was also really important and deserves protection, or something comes up in prosecution and the easiest way to get around a rejection is to file a continuation. All the claims in the patent family are unique."

Thanks, this makes a lot more sense now, especially this part:

> they wanted to claim some shit that you disclosed in the parent but didn't claim, and it got granted

Also, thanks to your friend!

Would you take a penny from Softbank?

A penny from Softbank? Didn't you get the memo? Softbank requires you to take at least 1 billion.

and if you don't they will force your competitor to take $1B.

Getting funding from Softbank is like foie gras: they'd literally stuff dollars down your throat.

Yes, it might end up making your startup sick too...

Softbank is not a software company and probably isn't trying to copy and undercut your business in the future

Nah, they'll just fund your competitor as well, and pit you against each other to see who survives :).

Even if that happens, that's fine. Softbank has no incentive for your business to fail. The company that dies, is more money out of the visionfund.

On the other hand, FB does have an incentive. Sure, they lose that investment, but they gain their own internal company that they own 100% of which has eaten your marketshare.

I wouldn't take a penny from either. It's a wide world with an unprecedented amount of capital in the hands of wealthy investors. There are plenty of funding sources that are neither surveillance monopolists nor government administrations that torture and murder journalists.

And? You'd probably walk away with at least 6 digits in your bank account. 7 or maybe 8 if you're lucky.

This is the kind of money I wouldn't say no except for a very good reason.

Money > ethics in your worldview? This is compounding the issue and creating a toxic incentive.

Money is objective while ethics are not

This is a meaningless comment.

You can mark assets on a spreadsheet, plot profits on a graph, and the result is simply a representation of the abstract concept: finances.

When you factor intent, then money becomes objective. When you factor the ethics of the entity using financial influence, then the result is objective because it affects the real world.

I don't know how else to explain this, and maybe I can't convince you, but real people are affected by these choices.

Profits are never a meaningful metric precisely because they can't be divorced from ethics.

Everyone has a price.

No, but ethics should be on your business model not so much on who's financing it.

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