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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  1. identicon
    Mikester, 30 Jun 2004 @ 4:18pm

    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Beck, 30 Jun 2004 @ 6:51pm

    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.)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 Jul 2004 @ 8:19am

    Re: Hard to refute that one

    That's common in music scores too.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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