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Facebook and Its Rivals

by on December 6, 2010

[Cross-posted from Mises Blog]

I enjoyed the interview with Mark Zuckerberg last night on 60 Minutes, and especially his dismissive comments toward the Winklevoss Twins and their ridiculous IP suit against Facebook that extracted $64 million from the company. I’ve written about the movie Social Network as a case study of how preposterous it is to claim that parallel invention amounts to an act of thievery.

Sad to say, however, Facebook itself has used IP litigation as a method of shoring up its own market share and crushing potential rivals. It went after a German site. It targeted Teachbook. It hammered a parody site called Lamebook and a porn site too. Innumerable sites could be the subject of IP litigation, including Goodreads and Academia.edu. Such legal action is a threat to the learning and emulative process that free markets inspire. It is a way of short-circuiting the competitive process, giving Facebook an unfair advantage over its rivals, using the state has a weapon.

Facebook might must say that this is merely an eye-for-an-eye form of defensive litigation. After all, some washed up dot com is suing Facebook for IP infringement and some company no one has ever heard of claims that it invented the news feed and wants it back.

How about we just stop the madness and try the free market for a change?

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The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.

We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective.

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To the extent possible under law, Stephan Kinsella has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to C4SIF. This work is published from: United States. In the event the CC0 license is unenforceable a  Creative Commons License Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License is hereby granted.