LB is an Indian company. If a US company and Indian company invent the same thing regardless of chronological order and if each company takes patents in their r

LB is an Indian company. If a US company and Indian company invent the same thing regardless of chronological order and if each company takes patents in their respective country, this can prohibit each company to operate in other's country. But you may be right. LB being hosted in US might well be qualified as 'operating in US', which might prevent FB getting patent in US. In any case, if LB was so paranoid about someone stealing their 'photo recommendation engine', they must have at the very least filed patent pending applications in India and US. LB's outburst suggest they are thinking of this as an infringement of some sort, but these things won't work in web startups. How many countries will anyone run around getting patents to make sure nobody else does it? Maybe, in future we have better governing stuff for the web,