By now it has become very obvious that Facebook is stealing ideas from Snapchat and trying to incorporate it into their own products and services. In fact they’re not even being particularly discreet about it, and strangely enough no lawsuits have been filed. However Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, could be looking to protect itself in the future.
According to a report from TechCrunch, it seems that Snap has acquired the patent to geofilters (which for those unfamiliar are filters used in photos based on your location) from a company called Mobli for a whopping $7.7 million. If you’ve been following the tech scene for a while now, you might recognize Mobli as being a competitor to Instagram many years ago which clearly did not make it.
TechCrunch managed to get their hands on an internal email which also confirmed that the sale of the patent to Snap was the highest amount paid for any single patent in Israel. Sources have told the publication that the patent was acquired so that Snap could protect itself from future litigation, and presumably to prevent other platforms from using it too unless they were to license it from them.
So far none of the companies or individuals involved in the sale of the patent have commented on it.