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Startup Claims Google Copied Web-Annotation Product
An anonymous reader writes "Web annotation startup ReframeIt claim Google copied their web annotation product when releasing Google Sidewiki. At first glance, the products do look quite similar, and this eWeek article has some interesting evidence, including suspicious user registrations by Google employees and an attempt by Google to hire off ReframeIt's lead engineer."
I was expecting some damning evidence from the comparison shots, but it just looks like Google made their own implementation of the same features. Copying features happens, and it's not illegal.
Hmmmm....
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
That's what capitalism is all about. Competition. If ReframeIt can't take the competition, whether it be for the product they're offering or for the employees they hire, then they need to reevaluate their business plan.
They may have copied it. But it wouldn't be the first time. A dirty, dark secret of Google's is that their main product, a search engine was a copy of AltaVista, which also had the dirty secret of being a copy of Aliweb.
And if you look at it, Toyota's share a lot of the major functionality of Fords. They all have a round steering wheel, for example; do you think they came up with that by accident, or do you think they were looking at other cars? They may have even had Fords available at the Toyota design offices in Japan.
Seriously, if you have a small idea that takes a small team less than six months to create, then you better have a really good marketing, a good implementation and sharp execution, otherwise some big company is going to do the same thing and win because they have better visibility and more resources.
Qxe4
Sounds like what happens next is you get some free publicity in the shadow and at the expense of one the world's largest tech companies. If the goal isn't to sue Google for actual harm done or laws broken then what else can possibly be next?
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ReframeIt is grabbing some free publicity by crying foul.
I don't understand. TFA mentions nothing about any legal issues. Unless there's any patent infringement or trademark issues I don't see why this should be frowned upon. I don't care if Reframe is a small struggling company, as a consumer I want as many companies tearing eachother apart at the same time -- providing me with better services and lower prices. This is exactly the kind of nonsense that hinders development, and no the product might be very similar but it is not an exact copy, and even if it was I would never side with the people whom I do business with -- as that would be completely idiotic. I'm not even going to bother with the car analogies as you all know how silly this type of reasoning would be if it was applied there. What's next? Are we going to point fingers at Mozilla for not inventing the concept of the browser?
I am the lawn!
Reframelt?? I was wondering what Google was going to do with snow-melt.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
It is possible, Google, like any large group of people, is made up of lots of individual people, and no one can keep track of what everyone else is doing. Thus one person at Google could be a murderer, or in this case steal someone's product, and it wouldn't mean that's the direction the entire company is trying to go.
On the other hand, these guys seem to be complaining of sour grapes if you ask me. It seems like Lunarr had a similar product as well.
Qxe4
The article doesn't have any evidence. Low-res screenshots with a few arrows aren't convincing, even if they did look alike. If you're writing an online annotation solution, it's quite probable it will look something like your competitor's product (and like a few other things in sidebars).
As for the user registrations: if none of the Reframe It employees have registered with Google to check out Sidewiki, they're stupid.
Trying to hire off a lead engineer? I'd consider that a compliment, for the engineer as well as for the company. And he refused, didn't he?
Furthermore, the article states clearly that the Reframe It CEO "doesn't want to sue Google," but rather, "By going public, Fishkin is hoping to get his story out there and see what happens next." The whining, cowardly 'see what sticks' - approach to competitiveness.
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
Software patents or no software patents? can't have it both ways.
If you don't want patents then copying of ideas will happen. It seems like a pretty obvious idea anyway.
All I have to go on are are quotes like "suspicious user registrations by Google employees" and two browser-based applications that have a similar goal and layout. But Google is the big guy and the startup is the little guy. So...Google is evil. I have barely anything that resembles a fact, but I know the truth of it!
WTF does "suspicious user registrations by Google employees" supposed to mean? Google has over 22,000 full-time employees (who knows how many part-time). I'm willing to bet that a decent percentage of them are web savvy because...well..that's what they do. Also, how do they know that certain registrations are Google employees? Probably because they users' email was @google.com. So, let's see if I have this straight, Google decided to steal this startups (fairly obvious) idea and couldn't be bothered to at least hide it by using gmail.com and not google.com? Or maybe Yahoo! or Hotmail. Right...
As for the interface. I did RTFA and they mentioned (with picture in a link) that both apps have the same general set of buttons and similarities in their interface. It's a freakin' application that does one simple thing, it annotates web pages It's not an application that say, allows you to edit 3D objects and has a bajillion buttons (witness Blender). That's a couple of buttons and a couple of textboxes. Oh, and as to how the button arrangements are similar: the cancel button and the submit buttons are side-by-side, with the cancel on the left. Someone call the police! That's a smokin' gun right there!
I'm not saying that Google didn't steal this app, but everything so far is circumstantial at best.
I've personally been in the same situation as this company but in our case it was microsoft. They didn't get too far.
We could argue about Google turrning into "the old microsoft",..... but what we should look at it how Google thanks to its, generosity in storage and services has bought the positive vote from the masses. Internet users will forgive and ignore mistakes and literally harmful things Google does, privacy, down times, being a spam favourite spam, source and destination, how they enter into industries and destroy them with their deep pockets.
The fact that the majority of people here are getting something for free out of Google clouds their view. The excuses and justifications given on behalf of the company are rife. "It is not illegal, You try doing it better, You try doing it cheaper" etc...
It is going to take a long time until Google gets a fair hearing.
As for this case we don't have all the details, however being a small company you would not go and attack a giant like Google if you had some valid claim.
Seriously. I'm not the brightest spark in the wire, but I had an idea for this 10 years ago, and even an implementation limited to a small online fan community. It never took off because the community essentially imploded and died. It used some clever JavaScript, that's about all I remember about it. These people have nothing to complain about, this idea has probably been considered by thousands and their implementation just happened to come second in the contest.
Day 1: "Patents and copyright are bad. At a stretch they do nothing good for us, but most likely they severly damage creativity and development"
Day 2: "The Evil Consuming Google has just illegally ripped off the product of a small competitor; punish them!"
Shouldn't Google get a medal for saying "up yours" to the copyright and patent system?
A W3C project did something similar to this back in 2001. There was even a Firefox (then Mozilla) plugin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annotea
no one can keep track of what everyone else is doing
Google manage it with us though? :)
Get your own free personal location tracker
source Umm.. he doesn't seem to be considering any sort of legal action to me.
Except they don't have a valid claim. The idea is not new, and almost every other web annotation product (thats right, there were plenty around before either of these) uses very similar toolbar interfaces. Of course, comparing to one of these other products isn't nearly as cool as comparing it to Google and trying to make a "big evil corporation" vs "little innocent hard-working can-do american-way startup" case.
I produced a paint program for Win 3.11 quite a number of years ago and ZOMG THE PAINT PROGRAM IN WINDOWS 95 IS ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME! IT ALSO DRAWS LINES, BOXES, FILLS AND TEXT! And the line tool looks like a line! And the box tool looks like a box! They totally ripped me off. That's right. Me. Never mind that there's plenty of other paint programs out there with the same features and the same look and basic arrangement. Nevermind that virtually every paint program since the Amstrad has alligned tools on the left, canvas on the right, and menu at top. Nope, I'm going to sue Microsoft because they ripped off *MY* product.
I am of course, being sarcastic. This is however, the exact point of view of the company in question. A Big Evil Corporation (BEC) has produced the same product that they, and several other companies have. However, the BEC version is free, and thus, is going to pull away any possible revenue they may gain. Even then, that point of view is flawed. There are still plenty of mail products, despite gmail. There are still plenty of office applications, despite gdocs. There are still plenty of other instant messaging clients in use, despite google talk. Etc etc etc. If you innovate, you'll survive. If you merely borrow other peoples ideas and produce a vanilla product that does the same, and then sue anybody else who produces the same, borrowed, vanilla product, you won't get far.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
That is, assuming that your creation really is new with respect to the state of the art, and really is non-obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
+1, inspiringly naive
It would be nice to live in your world.
Who?
...Thirdvoice and Webtaggers, who both launched their products simultaneously. Thirdvoice, launched by CS grads from Purdue, was panned immediately and a saynotothirdvoice community developed to shut them down. Webtaggers, launched in Austin by atypical techies from the day, changed course quickly, avoiding the backlash, as was later bought by Vignette.
As far as previous incarnations go, PMOG is basically a specialized annotation engine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nethernet Isn't it?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
they want their group annotations back.
Group annotations was what this feature was called when it was implemented in X/Mosaic waaaay back in the day:
http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/bio-soft/1993-June/004913.html
http://www.hypernews.org/~liberte/www/scalable-annotations.html
This is no original idea for any intent or purpose.
I have wanted this idea for a very long time, you can see my journal entry about it.
Sometimes I want to write into the text of a webpage, not add comments ontop of it. It would be cool to read the web and add sarcastic notes everywhere for your own personal viewing.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Annotation was a very early part of the design for the web, this is the W3C's reference implementation, which admittedly seems to only date from 2001, but the work was done mid to late 90s.
http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/
Back in the '90s there was a system called "CritLink" that allowed you to annotate web pages by using their front end at crit.org almost like a proxy (don't bother going there, it's been a domain park for years). A little while later a group with the somewhat incongruous name of "just say no to TV" tried to create a more commercialized and obtrusive variant, and got roundly criticized for "vandalizing" the web (an assertion I found odd, since nobody could see the so-called vandalism unless they signed up for it).
There's been several variants of this that require a plug-in, instead of using a proxy.
This is not a new idea. Google might well have copied the interface, but Reframe It was hardly the inventor of the idea.
Google copying things? http://www.pcworld.com/article/130497/rival_asks_google_to_yank_copycat_application.html
Hey, wanna know who else coppied your product? MICROSOFT! Ten years ago on that IE browser! Go sue those atemporal bastards!
wow, its amazing to see so many google lovers out there or are most of the folks here hired by google to promote their 'we do no evil' philosophy? if microsoft did this they would have been slammed to high hell from the get go...
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Except that Google used content searching and information about links, while AltaVista used full-word content searching with many spiders, while Aliweb avoided spiders and used indexed descriptions rather than content. So other than being different, they were copies?
...That YOU have no idea how the world works. Oh, and by the way, do you think everybody lives in your little 'land of freedom'?
Ethnocentric much?
How do these retard PHBs always come up with the idea, that they could make money with their mediocre ideas, that at least two other people on the planet independently came up with at the same time? Sounds like the dotcom bubble all over again.
If advertisement is your business model, then you're a dreamer. Because to live from that, you have to start out by being someone like Google.
And if a paid service is your business model, another idiot will copy your service and offer it for "free" in an ad-based "business model".
The only services that can really always ask money, are those who can offer a service that stays unique. One example is the Daily Show. Or a musician. Or any other form of art. (Not the distribution but the creation.) If it's good, then by definition nobody can copy that.
Everybody else must wait, until every last idiot has realized, that they can't offer that service on an ad-financed basis. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Given that 1) they're both basically electronic versions of the margin on sheet of paper and 2) form follows function, then I'd be pretty surprised if they didn't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Shhh! I was waiting for a load of comments about the House of Lords. And shush about that, too ;-)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How do you calculate the theft of value from a website's internal commenting and user contribution functions by services such as these? What about the violation of Fair Use by adjoining or abridging copyrighted content with such a service? How about damages evident by the content of unmitigated and unmoderated user submissions?
Whether Google or ReframeIt does it, it's stealing, and it's wrong. Sites like DIGG and Fark implement this kind of thing the right way, by centralizing the user submissions away from the site, and into a representation that does not adjoin the linked content. This is not stealing. This is an acceptable, legally-protected, alternate forum for contextual discussion which does not impede, supplant, or otherwise illicit participation from users navigating directly to websites in question.
Google and ReframeIt should be held liable for infringing on the copyrights of every site they encapsulate or otherwise co-opt with their software.
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.