So last night I saw The Social Network and absolutely fell in love with the movie and one of the main concepts behind it: Intellectual Property. The movie is essentially narrated through 2 law suits that Mark Zuckerberg is facing at the same time. One with his college best friend and Facebook CFO, Eduardo Saveri, and another with 3 Harvard classmates, who look quite intimidating to say the least. These 3 classmates were the first ones to come up with the idea of Facebook as a website to connect people with a "@harvard.edu" email address and wanted to call it Harvard Connection. Mark essentially built on the "idea" from his 3 classmates and developed Facebook as a way to not only connect Harvard students to one another, but other college students, as a way to connect and share personal information in an open and secure environment. It was his classmates who planted the seed, but it was Mark who developed the website with his own code.
Now the question that remains to be answered..."can an idea be intellectual property?" My belief is that it cannot. Here in business school, we're always throwing ideas around with one another to understand interest and gain feedback. The 3 classmates did not have any rights to Mark's Facebook website. The 3 classmates did not draw up a contract or provide an investment in Mark's time and efforts to develop the website. It was Eduardo who fronted the initially capital to develop the website, and in the end he settled with Mark for an undisclosed amount.
What do you guys think of the movie and how Mark went about developing Facebook? What about this question..."can an idea be intellectual property?"
Having worked in an Intellectual Property office, this issue came up a lot for us. Ideas are not exactly intellectual property. In order to protect your idea, you have to have a concrete embodiment of the idea if you want to patent it. (This could be as simple as a scribble on a paper napkin). It needs to be different from what's already out there, and can't be publicly disclosed (i.e. written or described) anywhere. An idea is only an idea, until you write it down and then protect that embodiment. That's why the publish or perish concern for researchers and academics is so critical-- not only do researchers need to publish their research-- ideas-- to get ahead, but at the same time they need to make sure they protect those ideas. Because, once an idea has been printed and has entered the public domain, the clock starts ticking and the likelihood of someone else taking your idea and running with it increases exponentially (obviously).
ReplyDeleteAnd even "throwing around ideas" with others can be dangerous if you have a really good idea-- this is considered a public disclosure. PLUS, if your idea ever went anywhere, those same "helpful classmates" might file for joint inventor status and try and take some of your hard-won profits.
In my opinion, if the Harvard students didn't properly protect their idea, then they can't fight that Zuckerberg stole it from them. But, they could potentially claim that they were joint inventors ... but this is a very tricky, very gray zone indeed. I haven't seen the movie and don't know all the details of the lawsuits, but obviously knowing the number of a good patent lawyer is VITAL if you've got a good idea kicking around in your head.