A little over a week ago, Tinder’s parent company, Match, brought a lawsuit against Bumble for patent infringement.  In case you’re not familiar with Bumble, it is the female dating app which requires women to make the first move.  Their main goal is to shift the “old-fashioned” mentality of dating and encourage gender equality.

The truth is, before diving into the merits of the case, there is a lot of background to the feud.  Whitney Wolfe-Herd, the CEO of Bumble, used to work at Tinder and started the app Bumble after leaving Tinder.  She shares the story of how the idea came about and how she built Bumble on NPR’s famous podcast “How I Built This“.  During the interview, there is a mention of how Whitney had accused Tinder of sexual harassment and how the terms of the settlement are confidential.

In this new suit, Match (Tinder’s parent company) is accusing Bumble of infringing on Tinder’s well known “swipe” feature.  As my colleague Nick Rishwain describes in his article, “swipe right” and “swipe left” have become a part of our every day nomenclature, often used outside of dating. In this lawsuit, Match Group accuses Bumble of infringing on multiple patents and trademarks owned by Tinder, including its “world-changing, card swipe-based, mutual opt-in premise.”

“Bumble sought to mimic Tinder’s functionality, trade off of Tinder’s name, brand, and general look and feel, meet user expectations that Tinder itself and its brand created, and build a business entirely on a Tinder-clone, distinguished only by Bumble’s women-talk-first marketing strategy,” Match said.

Tinder/Match.com is accusing Bumble of a few things, namely patent and trademark infringement. If you’d like to learn more about the trademark infringement case, I highly recommend reading my colleague Joey Vitale’s article on the issue.

 

1) Tinder is accusing Bumble of infringing on its U.S. Patent No. 9,733,811

This is the utility patent covering a method for profile matching.  Match alleges that the Bumble executives were all still employed at Tinder when the “match” patent was filed in 2013 and were therefore aware of it and knew it would be “unreasonably risky”, but did not try to avoid infringement or even design around the ‘811 patent.

It’s hard to evaluate the merits of the utility patent infringement claim without knowing exactly how Bumble works, but Match is essentially saying that Bumble’s servers practice all of the limitations of Tinder’s patent claims. They state as an example in their complaint that Bumble’s servers electronically receive a plurality of user online-dating profiles, each profile comprising traits of a respective user and associated with a social networking platform. When a Bumble app user downloads and initially accesses the application, the user device is required to set up a Bumble account that is associated with the user’s Facebook account, which is true but is not something specifically spelled out in their utility patent claims.

2) It’s accusing Bumble of infringing on its U.S. Design Patent No. D798,314

 

The is the patent covering Tinder’s design for a display screen, graphic user interface, and layout of other user profiles as seen by a Tinder user. Here, Tinder and Match are saying that Bumble knew of this patent because Gulczynski, one of the founders of Bumble, was a named inventor on the patent while at Tinder and had assigned his rights to Match.  The complaint also alleges that Gulczyniski and Mick “inappropriately” stole confidential information relating to proposed Tinder features — including an “undo” function and picture-messaging functions — before they left the company.

I actually tested the Bumble app to check the merits of the design patent infringement.  At first glance, the display and the way the cards and profiles are laid on top of one another is different than what Tinder is claiming in their design patent, and namely the solid lines in Figures 1 and 2 of the patent.  For the liked profiles, the design patent shows 2 profiles, one on top of the other where the front profile or recently liked profile is to the right of the following profile and tilted at about a 30° angle counterclockwise, and where the “not liked” profile is to the left of the following profile and tilted at the same angle but clockwise.

Bumble uses the same rotation and angles but in the other directions, which makes their GUI different than what is claimed by Tinder.  Now had Tinder included additional drawings, they would have been able to secure all different variations of the profile display.

 

3) Infringing on Tinder’s “swipe” trademark

Lastly, Match accuses Bumble of infringing on their “swipe” trademark and their trade dress (essentially the look and appearance of the app).  Tinder users can either “swipe” left or right with their fingers on various dating profiles. When two users swipe right, they connect — or “match” — and can begin chatting through the app.  Match is stating in their complaint that Bumble’s activities and use of swiping in the dating app is causing consumers to be confused and even deceiving them.

 

The Tinder v. Bumble lawsuit will likely take time to unfold, but if one thing is certain, it’s that the outcomes of the suit will most likely set a precedent for intellectual property rights in the future.