Member-only story
A lesson about intellectual property
Sued by Facebook
Guerrilla marketing made simple
In 2009 I was in Boulder, leading a startup in the location services business. It had been called PublicEarth, and was a wiki-sort of database of location information. When we redesigned the product and service a bit, we focused on the private nature of a personal atlas. The user interface moved toward a book motif, a series of volumes, a place where users could book trips and track their travels and there were numerous fun ways we leveraged the physicality of an atlas in the product. And we renamed it PlaceBook.
Moronic, yes, but it made us all laugh, and it was oddly fitting. Anyway, Facebook was very clearly a social network, and we absolutely were not. In fact, we argued the opposite — that location data was perhaps as personal and sensitive as financial data and that people shouldn’t hand that over to Google. We were a safe vault to store this private information.
Ten years earlier I had received some basic training in IP rules and trademarks from the attorney for my company Petroglyph, and while I’m not a lawyer, I felt reasonably well-informed. By 2010 other businesses were starting to use the suffix “book” to connote a social network — there was LawyerBook, TeachBook and even AssBook (“the booty call social network”)…
