We have all seen the movie The Social Network, the
movie that immortalizes the creation of the social media site; Facebook. In
that movie we were thrown into the world of Mark Zuckerberg, maker of Facebook,
and we witnessed the events that led up to his extraordinary success. Some of
those events consisted of blatantly stealing ideas from others and now, in
2014, we are witnessing this again, but in the news.
In an article by Jason Abbruzzese, I learned that Facebook released a new app on Monday called Paper which is
the name of an already highly acclaimed app that does essentially the same
thing. The original Paper was created by
a company called FiftyThree and has since been named the iPad app of the year
in 2012. The app launch brought CEO Greg Petschnigg to publicly ask Facebook to
change the name of their app, but Facebook refused and simply apologized for
not notifying FiftyThree sooner.
Petschnigg described Paper as a “computer application
software for smart phones and tablets, namely, software for use in writing on
smart phones and tablets with either a stylus or finger." While Facebook’s
Paper doesn’t allow the user to draw within the app or use a stylus, Petschnigg
urges that the similarities are too strong to be ignored.
This is not the first incident of a trademark complaint with
Facebook and I doubt it will be the last.
Theft of ideological property is the base of the network, why would they
change it now after we allowed it to
become a multi-billion dollar company? They seem to have gotten away with every
stolen good and the question I am facing is, “how does one even stop an
ideological thief if they alter things slightly?”
The article was posted on February 3, 2014 and can be found at Mashable.com.
There is no question that Facebook has stolen ideas in the past, and I don't doubt that they still do. However, it sounds to me like FiftyThree's version of "Paper" is more of a drawing app, for designers to make fashion creations, and bring other ideas to life. While Facebook’s "Paper" is an actual newspaper app. The names are the same, which seems bad, and I think that they handled the response to the other company poorly; However, I could see where they could get away with it. To me, it’s like having only one app named Calculator or Alarm Clock.
ReplyDelete