Company Claims Orkut Stole Orkut Code
from the more-Google-lawsuits dept
It's not like it's particularly difficult to write a social networking systems. These days, at the rate new ones are coming out, it practically seems like a typical first year CS student's project. Still, a company named Affinity Engines that builds social networking products for universities (that just so happens to have been founded by Orkut Buyukkokten - the creator of orkut.com) is now suing Google for stealing their code. From the article, it sounds like they have a pretty solid claim. First, it's obvious that Orkut had access to the code. He even continued to work on it while he was at Google. According to the lawsuit he promised repeatedly that he wasn't going to work on a similar app for Google, but then did so anyway. The real damaging point, however, is that Affinity Engines claims they've found nine identical bugs in Orkut that are also in their own system -- which certainly makes it quite likely the basic code is the same.
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Hard to refute that one
I'm sure the bugs weren't in there on purpose, but it reminds be of a report I did in college on map makers. They would purposely add a non-existant road or make some other subtle, but intentional mistake in order to catch other map makers that might be just copying their maps.
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Re: Hard to refute that one
The same thing happened with the Trivial Pursuit game. A trivia book writer intentionally put an incorrect answer in his book, and the game inventors put the same wrong answer in the game when they copied it from his book.
The author sued for copyright violation and lost, all the way to the Supreme Court. (You can't copyright facts.)
(The question was: What was Lt Columbo's first name? The incorrect answer was "Phillip". In fact the show never revealed his first name.)
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Re: Hard to refute that one
That's common in music scores too.
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