Facebook Wins Patents For Tagging in Photos, Other Digital Media

Hope they won't actually enforce this patent unless they start going out of business.<p>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.

I remember a site produced for WWW2004 (May '04) which had this functionality. The wayback machine has some of it: <a href="http://replay.web.archive.org/20041217231727/http://w3photo.org/photos/www2004/p1.ftw" rel="nofollow">http://replay.web.archive.org/20041217231727/http://w3photo....</a> I haven't read through the actual patent, but it would seem like possible prior art.<p>[edit] it was built with this: <a href="http://fotonotes.net/" rel="nofollow">http://fotonotes.net/</a>

Prior art: anyone who's ever written names on the back of a physical photograph.<p>Oh, wait. "On a computer." What magical words!

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

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 &#38; 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.<p>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<i></i>*, what a waste of resources.

Companies that <i>actually</i> 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.<p>The second enemy is patent trolls. They don't actually build anything, so defensive patents are useless.<p>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.<p>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<p>A, fine<p>B, fine as long as my servers are not in the U.S<p>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?