Did You Invent Facebook?

Go to sleep, wake up; another person claims to have invented Facebook.

Step right up, Aaron Greenberg. So let’s hear your claim, young man. So you started a service called houseSYSTEM at Harvard four months before the precocious Mark Zuckerberg started The Facebook. Other than liking your idea and starting his own social networking thing, Mr. Greenberg, what else did Zuckerberg do to support your claim? They did teach you about competition at Harvard, and how it’s okay to start rival business down the street focused on the same market.

Not to belittle Greenberg’s claim but it does demonstrate how difficult it can be to invent something.

Who really invented the airplane? Was it Clement Ader, Samuel Langley, Albert Santos-Dumont, or the Wright brothers? Who invented the telephone? Alexander Graham Bell, Philip Reis or Antonio Meucci? Truth be told, Bell Co. successfully battled 13 lawsuits over whether it invented the telephone, including five that went to the Supreme Court.

In all, the Bell Company fought out thirteen lawsuits that were of national interest, and five that were carried to the Supreme Court in Washington. It fought out five hundred and eighty-seven other lawsuits of various natures; and with the exception of two trivial contract suits, IT NEVER LOST A CASE.”

Often, invention is simply taking a nugget of a good idea, making it better through changes and improvements, and finding a market for it. A classic example is what Bill Gates did with BASIC software.

My hunch is that Greenberg’s claim has more to do with envy than IP, and that any legal efforts will fail. The people behind UConnect, which also made a claim to have invented Facebook, may stand a better chance given Zuckerberg did some programming for them while at Harvard.

(Note: I do give Greenberg credit for something getting the NYT to write up his tale of entrepreneurial woe but that may say more about the fascination with all things Facebook than anything else.)

Of course, we all know really invented Facebook: Pete Cashmore.

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http://skypejournal.com Jim Courtney

Bell Co. may have won the lawsuits but somehow, and much to the delight of Italians, in 2002 the U.S. House of Representatives has ruled that Andrew Meucci did invent the telephone. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,738675,00.html

“The vote by the House of Representatives prompted joyous claims in Meucci’s homeland that finally Bell had been outed as a perfidious Scot who found fortune and fame by stealing another man’s work.

“Calling the Italian’s career extraordinary and tragic, the resolution said his “teletrofono”, demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell, who had access to Meucci’s materials and who took out a patent 16 years later.”

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