May 19, 2011 07:56 am EDT

Facebook granted patent for tagging digital media

It's taken the US Patent and Trademark Office four and half years to consider it, but Facebook now finally has a patent on one of its central features: photo tagging. Applied for in October 2006 and just granted this week, this legal doc gives Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of his buddies credit for designing a method for identifying users in "a selection of an item of digital media." That could be photos, video, audio, or text -- the main drive of the patent is that it lets people associate a given chunk of media with a person and inform others of this association. The wording of Facebook's claims is rather specific -- you have to, for example, allow the identified person the opportunity to reject the identification -- so having this patent need not necessarily preclude other sites like Flickr from engaging in similar, but not identical, behavior.

Facebook granted patent for tagging digital media originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 May 2011 03:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Original Link: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/19/facebook-granted-patent-for-tagging-digital-media/

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