Facebook Wins Patents For Tagging in Photos, Other Digital Media | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Wins Patents For Tagging in Photos, Other Digital Media

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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.

It's interesting that face recognition is not covered, the tag must be done by a person

Interesting, since Facebook is employs face recognition to to encourage users to 'tag' their friends in photos.

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).

Right, but this is a trivial idea that's trivial to implement. Facebook would have created this feature with or without the patent system's existence, so the patent is a net loss for society.

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

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."

Agreed that they were first to fully implement this particular "graphical" tagging with confirmations. However the technology is nevertheless too simplistic to be patented.

Just saying that any business which is a leader in some new field comes up with similar inventions daily - not because they are ingenious or full of great ideas, but because nobody before even considered this path. It does not make them patent-worthy.

If moon astronauts would have patented their first step, nobody would have followed (example is bad on purpose :) ).

But anyway, still hoping that it was a defensive step. This whole system is so poisonous that it pushes well-intentioned companies into playing the stupid game to be protected.

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.... 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/

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

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.

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

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

Don't forget its cousin: "on a mobile computing device."

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.

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

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

Not that the judge was going to look at them.

Once again proving that justice is blind.

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

I've done that on physical photos. I wrote the names of high school friends on the back in the locations they appeared on the photo.

A police pin-up board with strings linking labels to features on maps and photos, perhaps?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

They hire the best in the valley to come up with this <good feature> to <build their userbase and provide a cool feature to users>. Then, their lawyers patent it because a big patent war chest seems like the best defense in the patent infringement war. Sad, but a wise business strategy right now.

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.

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.

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

Metadata in MP3s seems like a nice precedent too.

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

another sad day in human history

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?

...or Amazon, with their product images that have hotspots to hover over.

Wait a minute... Isn't this all just a fancy application of image maps? All of geocities is prior art!

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/

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.

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