Hope they won't actually enforce this patent unless they start going out of business.
This is going beyond ridiculous now, trivial ideas with trivial tech behind them have no value and should not be protectable with a patent - it's not like there is a face recognition technology involved, or anything an intern can't "invent" and code within an hour.
Right, but this is a trivial idea that's trivial to implement. Facebook would have created this feature with or without the patent system's existence, so the patent is a net loss for society.
Actually, that is precisely what the patent system is supposed to protect.
(IANAL, but...) The deal with the patent system is that the creator of an invention gets an exclusive and time-limited right to production and sale (or if method, use) in exchange for openly disclosing the details of the invention with society. Society benefits by gaining knowledge, the inventor benefits by having a temporary right to what they have created.
In the United States, the patent system is defined as "first-to-invent" (the alternative being first-to-file). By definition, it protects the "first to come up with an idea," as long as the idea is useful, novel, and non-obvious. The idea must also meet a statutory requirement, which is to say, patentable.
This is where arguments can be made, as programs may be considered mere "descriptive material."
Agreed that they were first to fully implement this particular "graphical" tagging with confirmations. However the technology is nevertheless too simplistic to be patented.
Just saying that any business which is a leader in some new field comes up with similar inventions daily - not because they are ingenious or full of great ideas, but because nobody before even considered this path. It does not make them patent-worthy.
If moon astronauts would have patented their first step, nobody would have followed (example is bad on purpose :) ).
But anyway, still hoping that it was a defensive step. This whole system is so poisonous that it pushes well-intentioned companies into playing the stupid game to be protected.
From a quick scan it seems they patented the ability to send notifications on tags, not tags themselves.
[edit] it seems they have tagging oo. I wonder what does flickr have to say about this?
Claim 1 is the primary part of the patent, and I don't see how it would apply to generic tagging.
Flickr does have this same feature, but they only added it in October 2009. Before that they just had generic "notes" and I would guess they are not particularly happy with the patent.
http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/10/21/people-in-photos/
No. According to the article, it's being able to tag discrete regions of the photo. What you describe is a tag applicable to the entire thing, not separate notes attached to, say, each face in the picture.
I remember a site produced for WWW2004 (May '04) which had this functionality. The wayback machine has some of it: http://replay.web.archive.org/20041217231727/http://w3photo.... I haven't read through the actual patent, but it would seem like possible prior art.
Tagging people in photos (and other things) is a fairly brilliant way to grow the activity in a social network. You send people a notification that they were tagged in something, they are very likely to visit the site to see what it was.
They hire the best in the valley to come up with this <good feature> to <build their userbase and provide a cool feature to users>. Then, their lawyers patent it because a big patent war chest seems like the best defense in the patent infringement war. Sad, but a wise business strategy right now.
With so many patent trolls shooting out of the ground left and right, and having success with their business models, there is really nothing else companies can do than join the bandwagon and also aggressively start registering & acquiring software patents, however trivial and/or vapid those patents might seem. Because in the end it's not the actual stuff in the patent that counts, but the effective legal and financial leverage that can be had with it.
Doesn't the American justice system have some safeguards against being misused for financial gain? You'd say some judges should be aware now how the legal system is gamed.
Companies that actually build things have two enemies when it comes to patent warfare. The first is competing companies that also build stuff. The best defense against them is obtaining a large patent trove. This creates a mutually assured patent destruction situation, shielding the company from competitors' patents.
The second enemy is patent trolls. They don't actually build anything, so defensive patents are useless.
Because of this, the most prudent thing for a company to do is aggressively acquire patents with one hand, and lobby for the abolishment of these patents with the other hand.
I think it's more important because I can already see many bringing up writing on the back of a photo as prior art which according to the claim doesn't apply. As always IANAL but as far as I can see other claims of others doing it also don't apply because those claims to prior art are not within a social-networking context and does not include the subsequent notification of such tags to someone else other than the person doing the tagging.
Fun Fact: last year I uploaded a photo that was taken of my class in 2001 where I marked the photo with lines mapping names to everyone in the photo. After uploading other friends then began to tag everyone in the photo, including myself...
For the record, I'm in no way defending this patent. I just think it's often easier to just jump on the bandwagon( - it is Thursday after-all) and not stop to actually think about what one is arguing against.
FOAF had tagging for people in photos back in 2000 or thereabouts. I remember demos which even outlined shapes within photos.
Facebook deserves credit for making it possible to do it all within one big system, rather than rely on a patchwork of URLs. But not for a patent on the idea.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 91.5 ms ] threadThis is going beyond ridiculous now, trivial ideas with trivial tech behind them have no value and should not be protectable with a patent - it's not like there is a face recognition technology involved, or anything an intern can't "invent" and code within an hour.
Like all great, yet 'trivial', ideas, it seems crazy that no one thought of doing it before them (or if they were, not at the same scale).
(IANAL, but...) The deal with the patent system is that the creator of an invention gets an exclusive and time-limited right to production and sale (or if method, use) in exchange for openly disclosing the details of the invention with society. Society benefits by gaining knowledge, the inventor benefits by having a temporary right to what they have created.
In the United States, the patent system is defined as "first-to-invent" (the alternative being first-to-file). By definition, it protects the "first to come up with an idea," as long as the idea is useful, novel, and non-obvious. The idea must also meet a statutory requirement, which is to say, patentable.
This is where arguments can be made, as programs may be considered mere "descriptive material."
Just saying that any business which is a leader in some new field comes up with similar inventions daily - not because they are ingenious or full of great ideas, but because nobody before even considered this path. It does not make them patent-worthy.
If moon astronauts would have patented their first step, nobody would have followed (example is bad on purpose :) ).
But anyway, still hoping that it was a defensive step. This whole system is so poisonous that it pushes well-intentioned companies into playing the stupid game to be protected.
Wait a minute... Isn't this all just a fancy application of image maps? All of geocities is prior art!
Flickr does have this same feature, but they only added it in October 2009. Before that they just had generic "notes" and I would guess they are not particularly happy with the patent. http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/10/21/people-in-photos/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brevity/10826112/
Granted, as a user script it didn't do anything to help you find all the pictures you were tagged in; that would require a database.
Oh, wait. "On a computer." What magical words!
And that's for illegal dumping, or for IP.
[edit] it was built with this: http://fotonotes.net/
Flickr went out of their way to make their photo tagging privacy-friendly back in 2008-09. Is Facebook now claiming something Flickr pioneered?
I don't know much about what FB was like at the time; I barely used it. I'm not accusing, just asking.
1. http://www.quickmeme.com/Annoying-Facebook-Girl/
Doesn't the American justice system have some safeguards against being misused for financial gain? You'd say some judges should be aware now how the legal system is gamed.
The second enemy is patent trolls. They don't actually build anything, so defensive patents are useless.
Because of this, the most prudent thing for a company to do is aggressively acquire patents with one hand, and lobby for the abolishment of these patents with the other hand.
I think it's more important because I can already see many bringing up writing on the back of a photo as prior art which according to the claim doesn't apply. As always IANAL but as far as I can see other claims of others doing it also don't apply because those claims to prior art are not within a social-networking context and does not include the subsequent notification of such tags to someone else other than the person doing the tagging.
Fun Fact: last year I uploaded a photo that was taken of my class in 2001 where I marked the photo with lines mapping names to everyone in the photo. After uploading other friends then began to tag everyone in the photo, including myself...
For the record, I'm in no way defending this patent. I just think it's often easier to just jump on the bandwagon( - it is Thursday after-all) and not stop to actually think about what one is arguing against.
A, fine
B, fine as long as my servers are not in the U.S
C, not fine in any circumstance
Facebook deserves credit for making it possible to do it all within one big system, rather than rely on a patchwork of URLs. But not for a patent on the idea.