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Facebook Ordered To Turn Over Source Code

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the revealing-trade-secret-super-poke-tech dept.

consonant writes "A Delaware District Court judge has ordered Facebook to turn over ALL its source code to Leader Technologies, who allege patent infringements by Facebook. The patent in question appears to be for 'associating a piece of data with multiple categories.' Additionally, while the judge in question deems it fine to let Leader Technologies look at Facebook's source (for a patent, no less!) in its entirety for a single feature, it would be 'overboard to ask a patent holder to disclose all of their products that practice any claim of the patent-in-suit.'"

2 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Patent infringement x 2! by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There's been dozens of Myspace and Facebook clones out there. None have particularly succeeded. The underlying tech isn't what drives their success. It's the ability of their Marketing Droids to convince people that the emperor is really not, in fact, stark naked.

    I think what really drives Facebook is that it reached the critical mass to get a strong network effect.

    As you pointed out with the source code, there are numerous sites that could have served the role Facebook presently serves. I suspect this is a system that was destined to converge on one particular website, but was chaotic with respect to which site would get the crown.

  2. Re:this patenting thing ... by ari_j · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you actually read the patent, which is something that the submitter appears to have skipped, it goes quite a bit further than just many-to-many database relationships. For something written in 2000, it is definitely novel. Whether it is appropriate for patent protection is debatable, of course, but it's not just a description of a relational database.