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How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

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Re: How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

#2

Post by willlisten »

As a founder of a new company and the son of a lawyer lawsuits are certainly something I think about. It seems all companies that become well known eventually face lawsuits. While it sucks and you never want to face one, many know it is a cost of doing business. You also find people who want to attack a company seeing a big dollar sign in front of them. Plus lawyers might earn hundreds of millions or dare I say billions if they win a case from a company like Facebook or Google.

Re: How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

#3

Post by PakG1 »

willlisten wrote: post #2

As a founder of a new company and the son of a lawyer lawsuits are certainly something I think about. It seems all companies that become well known eventually face lawsuits. While it sucks and you never want to face one, many know it is a cost of doing business. You also find people who want to attack a company seeing a big dollar sign in front of them. Plus lawyers might earn hundreds of millions or dare I say billi…

When the Twitter strategy docs got leaked a while back, there was a specific section that dealt with potential lawsuits.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-... (see Defensive Strategy section)

Legal

- We will be sued for patent infringement, repeatedly and often

- Should we get a great patent attorney to proactively go after these patents (We need to talk about this more, we are unsatisfied)

Re: How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

#4

Post by dodo53 »

I wonder if he asked EFF if they were willing to defend the case. The thing is it's probably never individually worth defending against these cases, but on a society level there'd be so much gain if someone had set a legal precedence for the validity of robots.txt.

Re: How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

#5

Post by michaelpinto »

willlisten wrote: post #2

As a founder of a new company and the son of a lawyer lawsuits are certainly something I think about. It seems all companies that become well known eventually face lawsuits. While it sucks and you never want to face one, many know it is a cost of doing business. You also find people who want to attack a company seeing a big dollar sign in front of them. Plus lawyers might earn hundreds of millions or dare I say billi…

...but those millions may take years to win. Every lawsuit has an opportunity cost. Yes if you get to a certain level that is the cost of doing business, but if you are just out of the gate and have X dollars and Y hours in the day that may be a poor investment. Also there's a difference between a disruptive cost in upsetting an old industry (say a YouTube or Napster) vs. fighting a single companies' walled garden. At the end of the day building a company on top of another companies walled garden is a high risk to begin with, so it could be better to just move on.

Re: How I got sued by Facebook (2010)

#9

Post by bertil »

dodo53 wrote: post #4

I wonder if he asked EFF if they were willing to defend the case. The thing is it's probably never individually worth defending against these cases, but on a society level there'd be so much gain if someone had set a legal precedence for the validity of robots.txt.

They settled out of court:

> He was with the head of their security team, who I knew slightly because I'd reported several security holes to Facebook over the years. The attorney said that they were just about to sue me into oblivion, but in light of my previous good relationship with their security team, they'd give me one chance to stop the process. They asked and received a verbal assurance from me that I wouldn't publish the data, and sent me on a letter to sign confirming that.

The robots.txt part was just Facebook lawyers trying to grasp to a contract with them; the actual issue was that the EULA allows Facebook to make basic information available, but users do not expect such a database to be freely available. Although I personally regret there is so little done by the data team to help research, legal consequences were not worth the prank; what actually matters is usage, and Facebook clearly police the spirit of the platform rather then the law, even beyond their contract partner—see RapLeaf.

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