Social networkingFacebook sued over 'like' and 'share' buttons

The heirs of a Dutch Internet inventor are suing Facebook
for allegedly infringing his patents with the US social
networking site's "like" and "share" buttons, court
documents seen on Monday said.
The family of Jos Van Der Meer, a computer scientist,
programmer and inventor who died in 2004, is bring
represented by patent-holding company Rembrandt in the
suit brought before a US court in Virginia on February 4.
The suit for unspecified damages claims Facebook's
infringement of two related patents filed by Van Der
Meer, who is described as "a pioneer in the development of
user-friendly web-based technologies", in 1998.
One patent "claimed a novel technology that gave ordinary
people... the ability to create and use what Van Der Meer
called a personal diary," court papers said.
The system allowed people to "collect personal information
and third-party content, organise the information
chronologically on a personalised web page and share the
information with a selected group of people, such as the
user's friends, through the use of user-settable privacy
levels."
The second patent is for technology that enables "the
automatic transfer, at a user's request, of third-party
content from a content provider's website to the user's
personal diary page" -- akin to Facebook's "share" or
"like" buttons.
Van Der Meer set up a company to commercialise his
inventions, Aduna, registered the surfbook.com website,
and launched a pilot system, but died in 2004.
The inventor's family, including his widow, enlisted the
help of Rembrandt, which says it works to help inventors
and patent owners enforce their fights against companies
that use their inventions without paying for them.
The suit notes that one of Facebook's own patents cited
one of Van Der Meer's patents and so the company was
aware of the infringement.
"Although Mark Zuckerberg did not start what became
Facebook until 2003, it bears a remarkable resemblance,
both in terms of its functionality and technical
implementation, to the personal web page diary that Van
Der Meer had invented years earlier," court documents
said.
The suit also targets AddThis, "one of the largest and
most widely used social bookmarking services and an early
partner with Facebook", which helps disseminate
Facebook's "like" and "share" buttons on third party
websites.
Facebook has been targeted by a swathe of lawsuits for
alleged intellectual property infringement, but few have
been successful.