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Facebook Locks Down Social Gift Giving Patent

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the no-presents-for-you dept.

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."

3 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. beam in thine own eye by t2t10 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:beam in thine own eye by MareLooke · · Score: 3, Informative

      No fair use? Citation needed because I seriously believe you pulled that one out of your ass. Afaik copyright law is also still in the hands of individual countries anyway, over here at least schools are free to use published articles in their entirety as they see fit, for example.

      And yeah spreading hate and trying to retroactively alter history (eg. negationism) isn't allowed in most of Europe, which is bad how? Also limits on competition? There's limits to prevent LACK of competition (ask all of your fellow Americans that get the "choice" of having only 1 cable provider how well that works for them)

      No idea why you were modded informative, as a Troll you did a damn good job though

  2. Re:Zuckerpunch! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can see it mentioned here.. "BlogBling"

    http://web.archive.org/web/20050405082100/http://www.bigattichouse.com/thoughtbrew.php

    I have the source and whatnot, and I know a few blogs still link to it.