Six Degrees patent

The Six Degrees patent,^[1] United States patent #6,175,831, "Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system", granted to Andrew Weinreich et al., has been considered the definitive patent covering social networking by the owners of Tribe.net and LinkedIn.^[2] The patent defined a social network as the ability to see the people you do not know through the people you do know, made possible by indexing people's relationships in a single database.^[3] The patent was sold along with SixDegrees to YouthStream Media Networks in 2000 and later to Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Mark Pincus of Zynga and Tribe.net for $700,000 at an auction in 2003.^{[4] [5] [6]} When explaining his reasoning for purchasing the Six Degrees patent, Hoffman stated, "Right now you're hearing a lot of spurious patent threats (...) And that's why I moved quickly to get a patent that was foundational."^[7] He also commented on other entrepreneurs' views of social networking: "The general attitude among entrepreneurial people is that they think that they were first and that there is no history to what they are doing (...) Both Mark and I had tracked six degrees as an intellectual precursor to our own businesses."^[2] Andrew Katz of Fox Rothschild, specialist in Internet intellectual property, said of Hoffman's and Pincus' acquisition of the patent: "It should be taken very seriously by everybody in the industry because it is in the hands of people who have the means and the business acumen to enforce it properly."^[2]

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