Facebook Sued For Alleged Theft of Data Center Design 74
itwbennett writes British engineering company BladeRoom Group says it contacted Facebook in 2011 about using its technique, which involves constructing data centers in a modular fashion from pre-fabricated parts. What happened next isn't clear, since much of the public version of BRG's lawsuit is redacted. But it claims Facebook ended up stealing its ideas and using them to build part of a data center in Lulea, Sweden, that opened last year. 'Facebook's misdeeds might never have come to light had it decided that simply stealing BRG's intellectual property was enough,' the company said in its lawsuit, filed Monday at the federal district court in San Jose, California. "Instead, Facebook went further when it decided to encourage and induce others to use BRG's intellectual property though an initiative created by Facebook called the 'Open Compute Project.'"
Modular design... (Score:5, Insightful)
... it's apparently an exclusive concept to BRG [facepalm]
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Anywhere in the universe. Forever.
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Sorry, I shall pay you for that immediately! Please, take my first born as penance.
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You'll also have to turn over your sperm and/or eggs in perpetuity so you can't make any more copies in the future.
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Facepalming as an expression of exasperation is a conceptual construct that is my imaginary property and you have to give me money for saying, using, or thinking it. Anywhere in the universe. Forever.
I would never use that expression of exasperation anyway...
I know where my hands have been!
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Congratulations on taking the standard Slashdot approach of taking such a broad view of the claim that you must be in orbit when considering the case.
BRG feels it can show in court that it can prove that Facebook was approached by BRG with its design methodology for modular data centres, that it can prove that Facebook went on to use BRGs design methodologies in a directly related project with agreement with BRG, and they also feel that they can prove that their design methodologies are special enough in th
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Re:Modular design... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, i mean, if you're going to effectively patent troll ...
TFA says nothing about patents. The lawsuit is over trade secrets and breach of contract. This clearly implies that a contract was signed between BRG and Facebook, and that as a result of that contract, BRG disclosed their trade secrets to Facebook. So the only thing that matters here is what does the contract say? Since we don't know that, commenting further on this issue is silly.
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TFA says nothing about patents. The lawsuit is over trade secrets and breach of contract.
TFS says nothing about contracts, and this is slashdot so you have to assume that people will not RTFA. I blame the summary.
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TFS says nothing about contracts, and this is slashdot so you have to assume that people will not RTFA. I blame the summary.
From TFA:
BRG is suing Facebook for theft of trade secrets and breach of contract, among other things, and asks for a jury trial. It’s seeking unspecified financial damages and an injunction to stop anyone using its technique.
It didn't say about signing, but BRG claims that they have established a contract with FB. It could be paper/verbal contract. Who knows at this point?
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Yeah, i mean, if you're going to effectively patent troll, target the company with the most value first.
This is not usually how patent trolls operate. They usually test the waters against small companies that can ill afford to take a infringement case to trial. Once a certain level of precedence is set with victories or settlements at a relatively cheep cost, then you go after the big fish with the big pockets (having already fattened your own war chest with prior "wins".
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I get that BRG feels that way. Considering the specifics of their claim it sounds like Facebook contacted them expecting something unique and novel, found it wasn't, and BRG being greedy and knowing it's the all mighty Facebook tried to gouge them and lost any hope of working together. Facebook went on and said, "lets just do what we do every day and build in a modular manner" (you know, like classes/methods in programming).
It's such an obvious and old concept that it's not even worth thinking about that
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Depends on the country... Canada has a bunch of exceptions in their copyright law regarding building design.
racks, equipment, wires... filing my patent now (Score:3)
correct me if I'm wrong... but didn't this whole concept of racks, equipment, wires, central power come from the telephone company 100 years ago?
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no. that's a completely different industry. it would never have occurred to Facebook to do this kind of thing but for BRG.
Wouldn't be the first time... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Wouldn't be the first time that Mark had blatantly stolen someone else's idea.
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Wouldn't be the first time that Mark had blatantly stolen someone else's idea.
Next up, BRG will abandon their ridiculous claims, be put on trial for fraud, cut off their monitoring anklets and tape them to a broom handle mounted on a ceiling fan. You know, for fun. CYA in Belize!!!
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At least they are hardware people, so they should be able to come up with something more convincing of their movement than that broom handle/ceiling fan thing.
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You are correct - I missed that one, and I even recall Sun's announcement about them... Bitrot in the synapses is my only excuse...
Lawyers must be warming up... (Score:2)
'Facebook's misdeeds might never have come to light had it decided that simply stealing BRG's intellectual property was enough,' the company said in its lawsuit, filed Monday at the federal district court in San Jose, California.
They surely must be salivating...
prior art? (Score:1)
"its technique, which involves constructing data centers in a modular fashion from pre-fabricated parts."
sounds kinda like how we used to build cell sites twenty-five years ago... (back when they required dedicated buildings)
Concepts Aren't Proprietary (Score:2)
Particularly after you start trying to license/sell the concepts to a lot of other companies.
Trade secret? (Score:3)
How can you claim something is a trade secret if you show it to others? If you want to keep your design proprietary, patent it.
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It doesn't matter. The idea of these lawsuits is to just cause enough trouble that it becomes more economical for Facebook to settle than to spend the money on a legal defence. The litigants in this case likely have a still-born company so don't have anything to lose anyway. They are probably not even paying the lawyers involved.
There really isn't much Facebook can do. If they see it through to a successful defence I assure you the litigants will have zero funds to pay out Facebook's costs and will just go
Re:Trade secret? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yup, why do you think IBM and their Nazgul went after SCO so heavily despite it probably costing 10x what a settlement would have? Because it's cheaper in the long run to kill the invaders and put their heads on pikes outside your walls than to pay them off.
Re:Trade secret? (Score:4, Informative)
How can you claim something is a trade secret if you show it to others? If you want to keep your design proprietary, patent it.
Or, show it to prospective customers/partners under a Non Disclosure Agreement. Like happens millions of times a year throughout most industries, and probably (I'd be very surprised to find otherwise) happened in this case.
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Re:Trade secret? (Score:4, Insightful)
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When I attended a conference on behalf of a large tech company, I was told to be on the lookout for people trying to pitch products or partnerships. These guys will say they are the CEO of some company, describe some obvious improvement for a future version of a product, then sue you for "stealing their idea" years later. The phrase "contacted Facebook" sounds more like "talked to a random employee" than "participated in a business meeting under NDA".
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The phrase "contacted Facebook" sounds more like "talked to a random employee" than "participated in a business meeting under NDA".
Could be - who knows. I'm sure that's exactly the sort of thing that would come out in the civil trial, or, being absent from any evidence provided in the suit, possibly cause the judge to throw the whole thing out. I'm party to multiple NDA's, and it can be very dangerous ground if you're not careful.
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NDAs are only for things that are not public. An NDA for a product under development makes sense. An NDA for a released product makes no sense.
Re:Trade secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
An NDA for a released product makes no sense.
Sure it does. Just because a product is available to buy doesn't meant that every aspect of its design, operation, or future plans for evolution and enhancement by the manufacturer are something they consider public domain.
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Future plans would, by definition, be unreleased product, so that does not count.
And it doesn't really matter what they 'consider' public domain. A car manufacturer may very well 'consider' his design to be a secret, but once the car is available for sale they can't successfully claim it IS a secret - it is right out there in public view. There may well be things that ARE secret, like how the design was done, what tools were used, etc, but those can not be determined by examining a care (well, if they can
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Future plans would, by definition, be unreleased product, so that does not count.
It may indeed count - lots of products have latent features included specifically to support future developments or accessories, or interoperability with perhaps some other product or service which is still in development.
A car manufacturer may very well 'consider' his design to be a secret, but once the car is available for sale they can't successfully claim it IS a secret
The "car's design" may not be a "secret" in the most casual sense of that term, but there may be software features, or other aspects of things like interface design that are not yet put to work because new options are coming down the road. Even if a not-yet-used feature or interface is p
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How can you claim something is a trade secret if you show it to others? If you want to keep your design proprietary, patent it.
Via a handy catch-all called an NDA [wikipedia.org]. Facebook is in trouble if it stipulated something like "BRG is presenting designs in confidence and all material is proprietary and not to be copied for any reason... Facebook will be held liable for any material/tangential loss due to disclosure of included designs..." etc since Facebook has allegedly shared their "secret modular designs" with the construction firm that won the bid, and Open Compute Project.
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Yes, but if they had an NDA they should be suing for breaking the NDA, not theft of trade secrets.
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Yes, but if they had an NDA they should be suing for breaking the NDA, not theft of trade secrets.
Given that they had to redact a good bit of the material in the suit, my guess is that they are doing both. And why not? Trade secrets are internationally recognized as property, and property law is pretty easy to assert. If they can show a clear paper trail, they will probably win.
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Yes, but if they had an NDA they should be suing for breaking the NDA, not theft of trade secrets.
If I divulge something that I received under an NDA, then you can sue me in a civil court for a breach of the NDA. For example if you hired me to organize your kid's birthday party and want it kept secret. That would be a secret, but not a trade secret.
If what I divulge is a trade secret, then you can make criminal charges for breach of a trade secret. Because that's what it is.
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[head slap!] Now, it's beginning to all make sense...
When I visited The World of Coke a couple of years ago, they would show me the vault that contains the Secret Formuler but not the Secret Formuler itself. Seems like a simple idear: I think these BRG jokers could learn a thing or two from the Coke folks...
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How can you claim something is a trade secret if you show it to others? If you want to keep your design proprietary, patent it.
That's what an NDA is for. If I have a trade secret, you sign an NDA and I tell you the trade secret because of the NDA, then (1) it stays a trade secret, and (2) if you breach the NDA I can get you for breach of contract _and_ with criminal charges for violation of a trade secret.
modular hospitals (Score:2)
So, part of their case is that a FB guy mentioned modular hospitals last year, and they're the only ones who do that sort of thing?
Sounds a bit thin to me....
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Re:modular hospitals (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the claims aren't listed so it's hard to draw a conclusion. There is a difference between "we pitched them a modular building and they had a contractor build a modular building" and "we pitched them a design for a modular building under contract, they stole the design, and had a competitor build it"
Don't hold your breath waiting for news of them... (Score:2)
Most of the claims aren't listed so it's hard to draw a conclusion.
And don't hold your breath waiting for them to be listed publicly, either.
If this is over trade secrets, the alleged trade secrets, if legitimate, will still be secret. So unless/until Facebook gets a judgement that the claims are bogus, the proceedings will be under seal.
Even if they ARE bogus it may not be in Facebook's interest to publish them, either. They might be little-known enough that exposing them to their competition might make
Ummm.... (Score:1)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Did BRG have that concept patented?
Doesn't matter (but would help their case if it were). Note that the lawsuit isn't for infringement (patent or copyright) but for breach of contract and theft of trade secrets (that Facebook allegedly only had access to in confidence, i.e. via aforementioned contract). It all depends on if Facebook's agents signed anything similar to a NDA when negotiating with BRG for a design contract, in order to review a proposal using their "modular techniques". If BRG was smart they would have papered it up very specifically before they showed any sensitive bits to Facebook.
Like TFS says we don't have enough info to know if something super specific about the design was copied (like some allegedly optimal ratio of airflow to floorspace to TDP). This is most likely just a contract chase, hoping that the words of whatever Facebook signed are broad enough to catch them for designing anything similar to what BRG had proposed.
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Like TFS says we don't have enough info
As that's going to stop people bringing on the torches, pitchforks and pop-corn. This is FB we are talking about after all.
Oh c'mon (Score:2, Funny)
OMG (Score:1)
"simply stealing BRG's intellectual property"
There's your problem right there. There's no such thing.
It's just people wanting to be paid for the same job multiple times.
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Get rid of all Democraps and Republicunts and America would be a much better place.
Very confused. (Score:2)
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Actually NO, its not standard. Have you ever tried pitching ideas to big corporations? They will all tell you to fuck off instead of signing your NDA. Only exception is if big corporation really wants something you have and is the party that initiated contact. Reason for this corporate behaviour is right there in the article. Risk of being sued is too big.
non-disclosure agreement? (Score:2)
So, was there a non-disclosure agreement? You don't have a statutory right to not have your ideas stolen.
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So, was there a non-disclosure agreement? You don't have a statutory right to not have your ideas stolen.
An NDA wouldn't help if the idea was nothing special. You have a trade secret if you have a secret that gives you a competitive advantage because you know the secret and others don't. But if others have the same idea and therefore the same knowledge about the idea, then you don't have a trade secret.
Apparently BGM wants to go bankrupt (Score:2)
So apparently BGM has decided that it's time to bankrupt themselves, cause I can't imagine that *anyone* would want to work with them after this kind of idiotic stunt.
The problem is... (Score:1)
that anyone on this planet is actually using Facebook to begin with. I have never been, and never will be, a use of Facebook. All of the people around me who have Facebook accounts wish they did not. Most of what I hear about Facebook from people who use the service are negative. Zuckerberg is not a brilliant guy, he just ripped off an idea. Sort of like what this article is describing. "Social media" is such an oxymoron, because the people who use it usually have no real social life to speak of.