Should the intellectual property law also protect ideas?
A bit more than a month ago, photo-sharing social platform Instagram has launched a new feature for their application, called Instagram Stories (Nytimes.com, 2016). With this feature, it is possible to post a photo or a 10-seconds video for only twenty four hours. After this period of time, the content will be permanently deleted.
One can say a lot about this new feature, except one thing: that its original. This idea of 24-hour stories is already being used by social media application Snapchat, with their Snapchat Stories. What is interesting is that Instagram didn’t even take a little bit of effort to disguise their direct copying. Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram even literally stated in an interview that Snapchat “deserves all the credit” (Techcrunch.com,2016).
With this straight-forward copying, the immediate question arises whether this action of Instagram is legally allowed. It is important to realize that an idea on its own is not protected by copyright and trademark laws. As long as the expression of an idea is different, one is allowed to use other’s ideas without restrictions. Hence, because of its deviated interface, Instagram didn’t do anything wrong, legally speaking. Duke law professor Arti Rai, states that it is possible to patent an idea. However, those ideas “cannot be too abstract”. This is the problem with Snapchat, as it has patented its own execution of ‘ephemeral message galleries’, but cannot really patent its concept of Snapchat Stories. Ideas can be protected by patents as well, but those ideas cannot be too abstract. Moreover, if the expression of an idea is sufficiently different, one is legally allowed to use this idea, which is what happened with Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories.
It has to be mentioned, though, that copying in the technology sector is nothing new. Think about Twitter’s hashtags and Facebook’s newsfeed, which are currently normal practice in almost every social media application (Volkskrant.nl, 2016).
My question to you is: what do you think about the current state of copyright protection in the techsector? Do you think ideas should be more easily (and broadly) protected? Where would you draw the line between what’s a common format and what’s intellectual property? Leave your comments below!
Sources:
-The New York Times, August 2016 (M. Isaac)
– Tech Crunch, August 2016 (J. Constine)
Instagram CEO on Stories: Snapchat deserves all the credit
-De Volkskrant, August 2016 (H. van Lier)
http://www.volkskrant.nl/media/instagrams-schaamteloze-kopie-van-snapchat-gek-of-geniaal~a4351070/
