A complaint against Meta that had been festering for a year was dismissed on Monday by a U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of New York.
Late in 2021, the now-defunct social network Phhhoto filed the case, alleging that Meta violated federal antitrust law by duplicating its core features with the Instagram-like video looping application Boomerang. Phhhoto, like Boomerang, which Meta launched in October 2015 and integrated with Instagram, allowed users to share GIF-like loops of incredibly little duration.
Eventually, U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto granted Meta’s motion to dismiss the complaint based on the appropriate statutes of limitations’ time limits.
“Phhhoto has failed in its 69-page Amended Complaint of 222 paragraphs to allege sufficient facts that cure the untimeliness of all of its federal claims,”Matsumoto said, labeling as “futile” any attempt to amend the complaint to address the issue of the suit’s filing date.
Boomerang, according to the lawsuit, was the culmination of Facebook’s anticompetitive full-court approach, killing the smaller company with copycat software that mimicked Phhhoto’s product “feature by feature.”
Stephen Peters, a spokesperson for Meta, stated in a statement that the firm was pleased with the ruling and that the case was “without merit.”
The plot took some unexpected turns, including proof that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, downloaded Phhhoto and opened an account a year before to launching Boomerang. Kevin Systrom, who managed Instagram at the time, was also intrigued in the features of the app.
As said in the lawsuit, Facebook began speaking with the Phhhoto team and even threatened to form a partnership – an offer that never materialized. By 2017, Phhhoto was no longer in existence.
Content Source: Techcrunch
