A U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit against Meta this week that had been boiling over for a year and a half.
A lawsuit filed by social app Phhhoto, which closed in late 2021, alleges Meta violated federal antitrust laws by copying core functionality in Instagram-adjacent video looping app Boomerang. Like Boomerang, which launched in October 2010 and was later integrated into Instagram itself, Phhhot encouraged users to share very short, GIF-like loops.
U.S. District Judge Kiyoyo Matsumoto ultimately granted Meta’s motion to dismiss the complaint because of the time limit imposed by the relevant statute of limitations.
“Phhhoto, in its 222-paragraph, 69-page amended complaint, has failed to allege sufficient facts to cure all of its federal claims for prematureness,” Matsumoto wrote in the opinion, noting that the timing of litigation I called for the possibility of some modification to solve the problem. “It’s pointless”
In the lawsuit, Phhhoto argued that Boomerang was the culmination of Facebook’s anti-competitive full-court coverage, effectively killing a small company with a copycat app that replicated “feature by feature” Phhhoto’s offerings.
In a statement, Meta spokesperson Stephen Peters claimed that Meta was happy with the outcome and that the lawsuit was “pointless.”
The story has several twists and turns, including evidence that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself downloaded Phhhoto and created an account a year before Boomerang was launched. Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, who was leading Instagram at the time, also explored the app’s capabilities at the time.
According to the lawsuit, Facebook began contacting Phhhot’s team and even dangled the partnership. By 2017 Phhhoto no longer existed.
