Why can't Facebook sue Google when most of UI ideas in G+ seems to be copied?

Are they waiting to roll it out to public? Or there really isn't anything that they can do about it?

4 comments

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ig1 15y ago ↗

You can't own ideas, only implementations of ideas.

Sure you can, every software patent grants ownership of an idea regardless of whether it is implemented, or even an invention.

petegrif 14y ago ↗

No - it has to be an invention. In other words, whether someone chooses to implement it or not the description section of the patent has to describe the invention in such detail that it can be implemented by someone with ordinary skill in the art.

jeggers5 15y ago ↗

As @ig1 said, Facebook don't own ideas. (unless they patent them).

They do have a very (very) specific patent on the News Feed if I remember correctly. Google does seem to have the same implementation as Facebook. I haven't heard anything about it though so I assume it's not an issue.