A lawsuit filed yesterday by Theodore F. Schroeder claims that Pinterest financier Brian S. Cohen stole a thought for a amicable pity service.
The suit, that was first reported in AllThingsD, claims that Schroeder “originated a ideas that led to a popular, ever-growing Pinterest website.” It presents a sincerely minute criticism of a expansion of a site called Redezvoo.com, and a spinoff, Skoopwire.com. The products were grown by Schroeder and dual of his Columbia Law School classmates, who eventually brought on Cohen as a company’s authority and CEO, according to a suit.
Eventually, a association stalled, that Schroeder blames on Cohen’s purported efforts to explain some-more tenure and pull one of a Skoopwire founders out. Meanwhile, a fit claims that Cohen struck a “Faustian deal,” giving Schroeder’s thought to a group that afterwards launched Pinterest.
Asked for comment, Pinterest sent me a brief statement: “The lawsuit opposite Pinterest is groundless and we will quarrel it aggressively.”
So what are a large ideas that Schroeder is claiming Cohen stole? Here’s how a lawsuit describes a similarities between Rendezvoo/Skoopwire and Pinterest:
- RDV’s Version 2 supposing a website for users to post their interests for their friends and a other users of a site to see. This judgment was remarkable in RDV’s business plan, done partial of a business indication and evidenced by a functioning web focus that had thousands of users.
- The thought of RDV was to bond things that mattered to a user with other users (i.e., uncover a user’s temperament around photos, hyperlinks and content descriptions of things that matter to them to their friends) while providing a place for a product or eventuality upholder to benefit prominence for a product. Pinterest is scarcely an accurate compare of this same concept.
- Skoopwire, a off-shoot of RDV designed by Plaintiff, focused quite on product find by socially networked product launches. The thought was that any new product launch would be lonesome on Skoopwire by a users and common with friends of that user, thereby igniting word of mouth about a product launch. Pinterest’s primary business indication as described in a media is product find by friends.
- The user interface of RDV Version 2 adopted a user interface technique called a “infinite scroll” many before a technique was used by any mainstream website. Pinterest uses a gigantic corkscrew technique, that has proven intensely successful in engaging users to sojourn on a website.
- In RDV Version 2, a categorical user interface (the “Board”) and any user’s form page (that user’s “Board”) adopted a judgment that is now executive to Pinterest. (Rendezvoo user’s posted to a Board and their board, while Pinterest users “pin” photos and descriptions to their practical corkboard.)
- Recognizing a value of womanlike users, RDV Version 2 adopted a pinkish and purple tone intrigue to attract womanlike users. Pinterest’s user village is primarily womanlike since of practices that aim females.
Now, I’m conjunction a technical consultant nor a lawyer, though we was struck by how extended some of those ideas are — if they were a kind of thing we could sue over, I’d suppose that a inundate of Pinterest clones and “Pinterest for X” websites would be in trouble.
As for because Schroeder waited several years to sue, a fit claims that after Pinterest launched, a series of people forked out that it was identical to Rendezvoo, though he “had no thought and could not have famous that Cohen was in any approach concerned in Pinterest.” He became wakeful that Cohen was an financier after reading a Mashable essay about him that was published in Mar of this year. (In fact a suit, that I’ve embedded below, includes what competence be a many minute parsing of a Mashable essay that I’ve ever seen.)
I’ve also contacted Schroeder’s profession and Cohen for comment, and will refurbish if we hear back.
Pinterest is a amicable networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and couple to products they love, formulating their possess pinboards and following a pinboards of other people whom they find interesting.
The site has gifted fast expansion in new months.
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