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Facebook Locks Down Social Gift Giving Patent
bizwriter writes "Facebook has been on a roll of late, nailing a number of patent grants that will help it retain dominance in social networking by creating barriers for competitors. Yesterday came patent number 7,970,657, 'Giving gifts and displaying assets in a social network environment'. Although it doesn't directly prevent other social networks from enabling gift giving among users, a clever legal and technical maneuver makes it far more difficult."
I though "meh, doesnt effect me". however, we really have to do something about software patents. this is getting out of hand.
What's the point of patenting things anymore if the "design", "process" or "technology" is so trivial as this? I may as well go ahead with my patent for "any method of expulsion of bodily fluids" - as dumb as the USPTO is, they'll probably grant it. Prior art be damned.
In europe I doubt many people will care much, I'll write my software without fear of software patents and just scrub off the USA from my list of places to visit, then when the legal letter arrives with "you must stop using our " I'll throw it in the bin and carry on with my life. If you live in a truely free country, you don't tend to care what other legal systems say, what matters, is what your country says... I love europe sometimes, although I hope that they don't change the whole "patents are not valid in europe" thingy.....and lets hope I don't bump into any "rendition crews" :)
*This 'Gift of Gab' is still awaiting approval from Mark Zuckerberg
Doesn't Steam already do this?
So now, my act of giving gifts to other people in different settings, can be owned by someone OTHER than me ... or, i have to oblige by a certain private party's demands, when i want to do that in a different setting.
explain me how this shit has not gone over the roof.
Read radical news here
pretty sure they had the option to give stupid icon gifts in profile page or some such thing. plus probably the buckets and buckets of other prior art i dont even know about.
You have been able to give gifts through Steam for a long time now. Steam is a social network.
Yeah, and that will happen after you launch a successful Facebook competitor and become a gazillionaire, right? These patents matter because the few companies that could possibly compete with facebook are global.
As for "truly free", Europe has serious restrictions on freedom of expression, much more onerous copyright restrictions (no fair use, for example), and strong limits on competition; in comparison, software patents are a small issue. And software patents are being pushed onto the member countries through the EU.
Subscribers are leaving in droves. A year or two and it will totally implode.
Deleted
That's an absurdly bad patent, and I'm pretty sure that even I have seen assorted prior art. On the plus side, it might help to stem the tide of people tacking 'social' onto every bloody warmed-over .bomb concept in an attempt to sell it to VCs...
I'm thinking we'll all be SOL if someone decides to apply for a patent on "breathing". Apparently the "non-obvious subject matter" test (USPTO 35 U.S.C. 103 http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/appxl_35_U_S_C_103.htm) does not apply anymore, or maybe the "greasing of the skids" is just more blatant now.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
well.. that's it.. no more gifts to anybody! not even on x-mas!
that's what they do. that's all they do, the walking dead weapons peddlers, & our self-appointed rulers.
disarm. read the teepeeleaks etchings, please. thank you.
We used to give gifts of food and clothes to the poor children in far away lands at harvest time. All the gifts would be on show a the front of the Hall. Sorry children, our church cannot give you anything this year. Kindness is patented.
In February 2007, a 100-page Pro graduation master's thesis with the topic "Virtual gift - Trading gifts in BatMUD virtual community"[17] in cultural anthropology for the University of Jyväskylä was published, written by a non-player in Finnish.
In any case, such bullshit patents really need to go. They are detrimental to the whole and do not benefit the public.
So if "The Social Network" is playing on TV on Christmas, suddenly millions of people will be guilty of patent infringement... because of giving gifts in a social network environment.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I just filed for 'Giving gifts and displaying assets in a social network environment by means of a computer.'
Suck on that, Facebook.
New ending! 2011
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
There is certainly prior art. I know that this sort of thing was done in Second Life from its inception. I am sure that similar gift giving was done in other online social networks since the very first online social network was developed.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
with some meaningless currency.
In exchange for giving a gift, users get a "gift token" that they can use to buy virtual goods.
As absurd as this patent is, it's also easily worked around.
I'm sorry but Catholicism already has a long standing patent on giving to charity and flaunting it in a social environment.
I8-D
/dead.
This is just f'n stupid. I would be embarrassed to have my name at the top of this as 'inventor'. This isn't really an invention. Do some real work.
I just gave something to a co-worker this morning. Nobody tell Facebook that I did that or I might get sued for patent infringement.
I can't believe that no-ones pointed out the prior art. I mean come on; Tagged anyone???
How about bebo? Plenty more where that came from ....
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
2007? Four years ago? You're kidding. Nobody thought of giving gifts and providing notifications in an on-line setting before then? How in hell is this not subject to prior art and/or simple obviousness? I'm no patent lawyer, but after reading through the application: this thing is utterly absurd. Why was it granted?
This should never have been granted.
There is loads of prior art in Second Life, Active Worlds, oh and probably every other MMO and MUD in existance.
No no no .... like all software patents, this is a "method for doing something we've all been doing for a very long time, but with a computer."
So your real-world situation isn't covered by this patent, merely doing the exact same thing involving a computer. Not having read the patent, I can only imagine that every claim is unique and something nobody else thought of before.
I think I shall patent "a method for pissing and moaning about the inequities of the world but with a computer" ... then every schmuck who gripes about the state of the world owes me money. That would be awesome.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
.. one guy at the patent office to look at each patent for about five seconds, and stamp ones like this with "This is stupid, go away... NO PATENT FOR YOU!!"
large communities like spin or jappy have this function since a long time.
...a clever legal and technical maneuver makes it far
more difficult....
Well, when you put it like that, it makes it sound like they'll have to... innovate.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
From March 30 2004:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/04/03/30/1435248/Spread-The-Love-And-Pay-Us
This is not my sig
I see that the patent was filed in 2007, fortunately I've had virtual gifts on my community site http://friendsite.com/users/SocialStatus/ way before then where users could 'purchase' them or give them to other users... matches the digital element of the patent perfectly...
Insert signature here...
Facebook is STUPID
.. one guy at the patent office to look at each patent for about five seconds, and stamp ones like this with "This is stupid, go away... NO PATENT FOR YOU!!"
Getting a patent is a legal process, which means it's subject to constitutional guarantees of due process. A patent examiner can't simply say, "ehhhh, no." They have to provide evidence that the invention has been done before or hasn't been done, but is obvious in view of stuff that has been done before. It's like a court - they can't simply say "eh, you're guilty" without showing sufficient evidence.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now Christmas will never be the same. You can only give gifts to people you have no social connection to. The only way around this will be to leave the packages anonymously under random park benches. And just to make sure you can't be identified and establish a social connection you'll have to wrap them in plain brown paper while wearing gloves so you don't leave fingerprints.
...have been doing this. The much maligned Gaia Online comes to mind. Pretty sure they were around before Facebook.
Doesn't LiveJournal already have prior art on this one?
Patents are supposed to create an atmosphere where people who actually advance an art can have their work protected for a period, in order to profit from it. This is supposed to foster an environment of technological, and or artistic development.
Giving gifts in a social environment should not be patent-able. As it does not qualify to any reasonable human as a new idea. There is a stipulation with patents that the thing being patented can not have been published outside of one year previous to the application. If it has been published more than a year previous it is in the public domain with regard to getting a patent to cover it. Facebook is abusing that system.
Patents are a bad mechanism to protect software, and horrible mechanism to protect 'ideas'. The current model for them was meant to protect industrial processes more than anything else, and needs to be barred from being applied to ideas in this manner, and severely overhauled before being allowed to apply to an 'idea'.
This Christmas I can tell my kids, "Sorry kids there will be no presents this year, Santa doesn't wanted to be sued by Facebook."
This same concept was in MMORPGs long before Facebook was around.
Sorry Facebook.
I seem to recall my wife mentioning to me several years ago that Cyworld, a Korean web portal/social engineering site, offered some level of gift-giving (don't know specifics). Facebook is just using its imaginary money to put up sandbags against potential competitors.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Not only is it stupidity to award something so vauge, but also it has already been done for years.
Gifts and trophy cases and badges and avatars and , and , and....
Just because it is not on a web page or a content management package doesnt mean its not a social network.
Thats the tact I would challenge on.
How does this patent provide an advance in the technical arts? That is always a missing item in these patents and it should be the most important, but it seems never to be considered.
...will "in a social network" become the new "on a computer"?
as long as it doesn't interfere with my patent for receiving gifts.
Didn't LiveJournal have this years ago?
I am sure that prior art exist, and that social networks existing before facebook did that. For ex. the social network parano.be (wich is a beerware and closed social network that was realy popular in europe in the 2000's) had the option to send virtual gift to other (but also virtual tricks, like "cream pie in the face" or things like that :-) ), for sure already in 2003/2004...
yet it's not in the US things are invented, but it's there that's patented... pfff ... you'r just a big troll, Mark.
Also applies to commecialism: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security [and economic] thinking. Those "security" [and "commercial productive"] agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
We can do better than allowing patents about gift giving.
Still, there is historic precendentfor this, sadly: ... At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast.
See also, by a Native American:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
Here is a PDF file with a presentation I put together on "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft".
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
Here is a 12 minute YouTube video of that presentation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
We can do better than this...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Reminds me of the Dogbert patent on TV static, whereby anytime any TV station is off signal and static displays on TVs, he gets paid his cut. That company became so valuable that he had major bidders for it, before he sold it :D
Did anyone happen to notice facebook announced they are closing the gift shop: http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=405727117130
No I don't know about sanity (some about lack of it I do know) of US patent law, but in "laws are sane" world where (US or outside) the prior art can be found should not matter - Finland has had dozens already way before FaceBook and I suspect most western countries have as well, and plenty of eastern too have had them before also - and I'd be willing to bet that such have been around in USA also for long time...
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
I have no idea what is it written as in Finnish law, let alone the translation to english...
Starwreck was made in Finland. Many know that in making the film they had to consult US lawyers about "Fair Use", but they also had to take same precautions in Finland too.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.