Facebook is an all-American success story – underdog college students turning a late-night experiment into an immense enterprise. Unfortunately with great success comes great challenges and getting sued by every Tom, Dick, and Jane is just one of them. It’s almost unavoidable that when industry giants like Microsoft value you at fifteen billion dollars you’re going to be served with a few lawsuits every now and then. Recently, however, it seems like Facebook has been bombarded with more than its fair share of legal disputes of what many cite as simply “frivolous”.
Denise Finkel vs. Facebook
University of Albany student Denise Finkel has accused four of her ex-classmates at Oceanside High School of creating a Facebook group in an attempt to ridicule and disgrace her in public. The plaintiff asserts that ex-classmates created a private, password-protected group on Facebook and spread false reports that she had participated in bestiality, used illegal drugs, and acquired AIDS. Denise has not only filed this lawsuit against her ex-classmates and parents but she is suing Facebook for $3 million suggesting the company should be held responsible for any content that appears on it.
Name-calling and cyberbullying is a common occurrence in the world we live in unfortunately and a victory isn’t awarded to everyone that files an online defamation lawsuit. Clearly Facebook can’t review every single piece of content that appears on its pages and to expect such meticulous oversight is simply unrealistic. Facebook relies heavily on its users to report any misconduct or abuse and unless it can be proven that Facebook failed to act after being properly informed of such defamatory/abusive behavior the lawsuit may not have a leg to stand on. Facebook’s TOS and the U.S. Communications Decency Act will most likely protect Facebook from any wrong doing and any legal responsibility will fall on the shoulders of Denise’s ex-classmates.
WhoGlue vs. Facebook
The problem with patenting programming is that the last time someone intelligent worked in the patent office was 1905, and he was too busy discovering relativity to educate his colleagues. In 2007 WhoGlue Inc was awarded a patent 7,246,164 on “Distributed personal relationship information management system and methods.” That’s not a patentable invention: that’s thinking of something people do and stamping legalese all over it. And that’s how a company with less employees than you have fingers on your hand is trying to take money from Facebook.
Jason Hardebeck of WhoGlue Inc. insists that the patented mechanism they used was “core to their business”. In contrast to this assertion, Jason says he later tried to sell the patent on June 26, 2008 at Ocean Tomo, an online auction site for intellectual property rights, one year after it was awarded to them. Why would they do this? Because that’s what you do with things that are “core” to your business operations, right? Regardless, when Facebook failed to buy U.S. Patent No. 7,246,164 B2 that’s when WhoGlue sued.
Unfortunately for WhoGlue the possible outcomes aren’t too promising as University of Baltimore law professor Max Oppenheimer, who is an expert in patent law, comments that, “It’s not a question of whether the patent is valid or not. It is: Can you stay in the game long enough to get the court to rule on it?”. Facebook has investments of over three hundred million dollars from firms like Microsoft. WhoGlue’s biggest client is U.S. Lacrosse.
Jack Thompson vs. Facebook
Everyone’s favorite “frivolous” litigator is back and he’s added Facebook to his suing-stuff-kids-like list of rappers and video game makers. Jack Thompson is now suing Facebook for not taking down anti-Jack Thompson groups that recently appeared on Facebook. If one social networking site owes this guy eight figures for allowing insults, he’s going to have to wait until we colonize the solar system before he sees dime one.
To put into perspective how technologically unaware Jack is, he apparently tried to contact Facebook by sending faxes directly to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg instead of simply reporting the misconduct electronically using Facebook itself. It must also be noted that Jack was disbarred in September 2008 by the Supreme Court of Florida for, among other things, submitting falsified evidence and obstruction. Facebook is fighting the lawsuit and they will most likely prevail as the U.S. Communications Decency Act usually protects sites from being held legally responsible for stupid acts carried out by its users.
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