
Facebook Wins Patents For Tagging in Photos, Other Digital Media - acrum
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/17/facebook-patent-photo-tagging/
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piramida
Hope they won't actually enforce this patent unless they start going out of
business.

This is going beyond ridiculous now, trivial ideas with trivial tech behind
them have no value and should not be protectable with a patent - it's not like
there is a face recognition technology involved, or anything an intern can't
"invent" and code within an hour.

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tmarthal
Actually, tagging photos was one of the 'killer features' that caused many
people to migrate from Myspace.

Like all great, yet 'trivial', ideas, it seems crazy that no one thought of
doing it before them (or if they were, not at the same scale).

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reader5000
The patent system is not supposed to protect "first to come up with an idea".

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tomkinstinch
Actually, that is precisely what the patent system is supposed to protect.

(IANAL, but...) The deal with the patent system is that the creator of an
invention gets an exclusive and time-limited right to production and sale (or
if method, use) in exchange for openly disclosing the details of the invention
with society. Society benefits by gaining knowledge, the inventor benefits by
having a temporary right to what they have created.

In the United States, the patent system is defined as "first-to-invent" (the
alternative being first-to-file). By definition, it protects the "first to
come up with an idea," as long as the idea is useful, novel, and non-obvious.
The idea must also meet a statutory requirement, which is to say, patentable.

This is where arguments can be made, as programs may be considered mere
"descriptive material."

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btucker
I remember a site produced for WWW2004 (May '04) which had this functionality.
The wayback machine has some of it:
[http://replay.web.archive.org/20041217231727/http://w3photo....](http://replay.web.archive.org/20041217231727/http://w3photo.org/photos/www2004/p1.ftw)
I haven't read through the actual patent, but it would seem like possible
prior art.

[edit] it was built with this: <http://fotonotes.net/>

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smackfu
The main claim in this patent is about you tagging a person and them being
notified and allowing them to reject the tag.

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neilk
Really? I seem to recall that Facebook didn't allow you to refuse being tagged
in a photo until recently.

Flickr went out of their way to make their photo tagging privacy-friendly back
in 2008-09. Is Facebook now claiming something Flickr pioneered?

I don't know much about what FB was like at the time; I barely used it. I'm
not accusing, just asking.

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ceejayoz
Prior art: anyone who's ever written names on the back of a physical
photograph.

Oh, wait. "On a computer." What magical words!

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CWuestefeld
No. According to the article, it's being able to tag discrete regions of the
photo. What you describe is a tag applicable to the entire thing, not separate
notes attached to, say, each face in the picture.

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yaix
Take a pen, circle a face, write "that's Bob" next to it. I believe somebody
may have done that before.

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CWuestefeld
So you're saying that there's 37 8x10 color glossies, with circles and arrows,
and a paragraph on the back of each one?

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Vivtek
Not that the judge was going to look at them.

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CWuestefeld
Once again proving that justice is blind.

And that's for illegal dumping, or for IP.

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amalag
Yet another argument for the destruction of software patents and/or moving to
another country to start a software company.

~~~
nhangen
Absolutely. In the poll earlier this week, I was hesitant, but now I can agree
with clarity. This is not constructive for the growth of our industry.

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Luyt
With so many patent trolls shooting out of the ground left and right, and
having success with their business models, there is really nothing else
companies can do than join the bandwagon and also aggressively start
registering & acquiring software patents, however trivial and/or vapid those
patents might seem. Because in the end it's not the actual stuff in the patent
that counts, but the effective legal and financial leverage that can be had
with it.

Doesn't the American justice system have some safeguards against being misused
for financial gain? You'd say some judges should be aware now how the legal
system is gamed.

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BasDirks
They hire the best in the valley to come up with this kind of crap so they can
patent it? bring on the downvotes, but f __*, what a waste of resources.

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smackfu
Tagging people in photos (and other things) is a fairly brilliant way to grow
the activity in a social network. You send people a notification that they
were tagged in something, they are very likely to visit the site to see what
it was.

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BasDirks
Yeah it's wonderful until _Annoying Facebook Girl_ [1] and all her girlfriends
find out about these awesome features.

1\. <http://www.quickmeme.com/Annoying-Facebook-Girl/>

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nroman
Companies that _actually_ build things have two enemies when it comes to
patent warfare. The first is competing companies that also build stuff. The
best defense against them is obtaining a large patent trove. This creates a
mutually assured patent destruction situation, shielding the company from
competitors' patents.

The second enemy is patent trolls. They don't actually build anything, so
defensive patents are useless.

Because of this, the most prudent thing for a company to do is aggressively
acquire patents with one hand, and lobby for the abolishment of these patents
with the other hand.

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neilk
FOAF had tagging for people in photos back in 2000 or thereabouts. I remember
demos which even outlined shapes within photos.

Facebook deserves credit for making it possible to do it all within one big
system, rather than rely on a patchwork of URLs. But not for a patent on the
idea.

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Meai
Seriously? So now I can't make a tagging feature for my own site..?! What the
hell...related question: I don't live in the U.S, does that mean I'm

A, fine

B, fine as long as my servers are not in the U.S

C, not fine in any circumstance

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earbitscom
Metadata in MP3s seems like a nice precedent too.

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Seus
how am i not surprised the least by this. maybe we need some programmers to
become politicians to fix this crap.

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mohsen
another sad day in human history

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ignifero
From a quick scan it seems they patented the ability to send notifications on
tags, not tags themselves. [edit] it seems they have tagging oo. I wonder what
does flickr have to say about this?

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smackfu
Claim 1 is the primary part of the patent, and I don't see how it would apply
to generic tagging.

Flickr does have this same feature, but they only added it in October 2009.
Before that they just had generic "notes" and I would guess they are not
particularly happy with the patent.
<http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/10/21/people-in-photos/>

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neilk
I wrote a similar feature for Flickr as a Greasemonkey extension back in 2005.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/brevity/10826112/>

Granted, as a user script it didn't do anything to help you find all the
pictures you were tagged in; that would require a database.

