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Comment by babarock | Hacker News Reader

> Mangham used a vulnerability to download Facebook's source code, arguably the company's most valued and secret intellectual property

Err... no! The company most valued property would be the data they have and sell. (I know this kind of comment will attract all kind of pedantry around the word "intellectual property", but let's agree on something: If they can sell your data, it's their property.)

I agree that source code exposure is a security threat, but it seems to me that we have yet another case of a journalist looking for a scoop by using big words.

Also, this story kinda puts a whole new twist to Zuckerberg telling Wall Street about the "Hacker Way" ...

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It's funny how people think that source code is a company's most valuable asset.

Realistically, what is someone going to do with the Facebook source code? Put up a Facebook clone? First, they need the infrastructure set up that can actually host the code. Then they need to figure out how to deploy it. I bet there are enough gotchas in that process to make it nearly impossible to do without having a few people from the company there to help.

So if they do get it running, what then? You have a social networking site that can scale to hundreds of millions of users, but you have NO users. It isn't any better than Facebook, so why would anyone join?

They can figure out the exact algorithms being used to rank posts, make suggestions, etc., which could be interesting to a whole lot of people-- users, competitors, spammers...

Damage can definitely be done, but it's still not as big a deal as many people like to think it would be.

'Also, this story kinda puts a whole new twist to Zuckerberg telling Wall Street about the "Hacker Way" ...'

Just a bit, given that it's fairly obvious that this guy wasn't being overly nefarious and doing what hackers are supposed to. With the way the Zuck harps on I'd have thought he'd have handed out a job and put him to work.

The users or their data aren't intellectual property. IP is commonly understood to be the things protected by copyright or patent law and some other things like utility models, trademarks and etc.

That list is omitting trade secrets, which certainly cover user data.

Data is an IP asset, just one that you cannot get a patent for, nor copyright or trademark protection, and so it must be kept private rather than disclosed.

You trademark your branding, patent your designs and processes, copyright your software and protect your data as a trade secret.

Customer lists are intellectual and business property. Cue "who's the customer" debate.

The real assets for Facebook, though, are its user relationships and the data stream this generates (where currency of data and interrelationships among it are key) by which it can generate advertising and other revenues through its true customer relationships -- the relations between FB and those entities paying cash on the barrelhead (or however the cool kids are conducting monetary transactions these days).

Brand identity, network effects, and a few other things also come into play.

Source code may weaken portions of the value e or expose windows of vulnerability. It's by no means the most valuable asset though.

There have been enough stories about how Facebook and Google are misusing our information so they had to put a misleading spin on this story. I can only imagine that Facebook's source code changes frequently, so what is stole rapidly depreciates in value anyway.

>arguably

I dunno, some people could certainly argue that their source code is their most valued and secret intellectual property, if going by their insurance claims alone.

It says "intellectual property" (read your own quotation). Data gathered from private entities is not (by definition) intellectual property.

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