No sooner had we reported news of sports site RootZoo suing facebook over click fraud allegations. Now news is breaking of another filing, seeing Power.com take on Facebook over data portability and unfair competition charges.
This is just another phase in the Power.com and Facebook drama that actually begun in January when Facebook sued Power.com for “copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition and violation of the computer fraud and
abuse act”. Power.com removed access to Facebook immediately after the complaint was filed.
In case you aren’t aware, Power.com is a aggregating web service that signs users into their various social networks and messaging clients and delivers the data from those sites and services to one page. Today, the aggregator is countersuing Facebook for unfair competition and data portability. The Brazilian based startup is claiming that Facebook is illegally preventing access to information that Facebook’s own ToS states users own.
According to Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch, Power.com CEO Steve Vachani believes this is the equivalent of mobile phone carriers preventing number portability in the past, carriers were then eventually forced to make it easy to switch to another phone company if the customer so wished.
Power.com will raise the point that Facebook themselves do their best to convince users to import their contacts from their respective email accounts. While Facebook is likely to emphasise their support for data portability with features like Facebook Connect which lets you access certain pieces of your Facebook profile and contact information from other sites.
Full details of the case can be found below:
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