Facebook sued over Timeline
Facebook are being sued by a Chinese company who are claiming to have created a feature identical to the Timeline feature long before Zuckerberg’s empire implemented their version.
Cubic Network, a Pinterest-style start-up founded by Harvard graduate Xiong Wanli, have used a chronologically scrolling page to present videos and pictures since February 9, 2008.
While it’d be easy to mark the similarities to Facebook’s Timeline (which was rolled out incrementally to users from November 2011) as purely coincidental, things take a slightly more sinister turn once you learn that Zuckerberg attended a talk by Wanli detailing the timeline feature.
Wanli also claims the logo to Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference is very similar to Cubic Network’s own, and that the Chinese network’s R&D centre was called F8 long before Zuckerberg founded his annual event.
Inspired, a rip-off, or merely coincidence? The courts will undoubtedly decide, but it’s not as if Zuckerberg is one to back down from a legal spat. His high-profile courtroom battle against the Winklevoss brothers (which became the basis of the film The Social Network) saw him defend against claims that he stole the idea for Facebook from his old college partners.
Via: The Register
