Facebook and What those Crazy Copyrights actually do.

Copyrights are a crazy thing. Back in the 90's, DC Comics changed Batman's logo and removed the yellow circle out of it. Now if you are not a comic book junkie like me, I doubt you remember the circle. It appeared in the first Batman comic up until the 90s, and then simply disappeared shortly after, without a reason given. Well it seems that the folks at DC(whose parent company is Warner Bros.) could not copyright the yellow oval so they simply decided to removed it. Again copyrights are crazy. Their are copyrights for stuff that most normal people are not ware of. Apple recently copyrighted two finger touch on it's touchscreen devices. Apple has not filed a lawsuit against anybody, quite yet, but they do own the rights. Google avoided putting the feature on the Nexus One to avoid such harassment. The reason why I am bringing copyrights up this morning, is because of the recent patent that Facebook was awarded. Facebook was recently awarded a patent for "news feeds". Now for most people who fancy themselves as non-social media fanboys, this will seem to mean nothing. However, this small patent like most, means a lot more than most people think. Now before I begin this patent does not effect twitter, which is considered to have a status update feed not a news feed, but it will affect other social media networking applications such as the recently launched Google Buzz. This patent could mean the end of Social Media as we know it. Newsfeeds, have become a prominent part of Social Media and taking them away, literally takes away the Social out of Social Media. In a day and age where people are getting more and more of their news from Social Media, this could turn out to be a prominent lawsuit, as it limits where they can get their news/links from on other Social networking sites. This patent truly eliminates a lot of the competition from Facebook, as GoogleBuzz and other social networking applications will now have to take a step back and reanalyze their approach to the Social Media world. This could be a good thing, as it causes companies to reinvent their Social Media approach in the next few years, or it could lead to the dominance and eventual decline of Facebook. Only time will tell. In a world of technology and applications that do just about anything the patent is a very interesting creature, what can be called copyrighted to you might be freeware to another. But one thing is for sure, the copyright might turn the Internet into a very crazy and protected place.