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(Image Source: Tech2)
BY DAN KENNEDY
ANCHOR MIKAH SARGENT
Facebook is facing a lawsuit over its use of the famous “like button.”
Rembrandt Social Media is suing the social networking giant on behalf of a Dutch programmer
who died in 2004.
The BBC reports programmer Jos Van Der Meer began working to create Surfbook.com in 1998
-- five years before Facebook first appeared. The goal of this website was to let people
use a “like” button to approve data and share with family and friends.
Lawyers for the plaintiff company say Facebook bears a quote “remarkable resemblance”
… “in terms of its functionality and technical implementation” to surfbook.
They go on to say, “We believe Rembrandt’s patents represent an important foundation
of social media as we know it, and we expect a judge and jury to reach the same conclusion...”
Rembrandt Social Media is suing Facebook on its use of two of Van Der Meer’s patents
without permission.
According to AllFacebook.com, one of those patents was issued in 2002 for a “web page
diary” which allows users to “collect personal information and third-party content,
organize the information chronologically on a personalized Web page, and share the information
with a selected group of people, such as the end user’s friends, through the use of user-settable
privacy levels.” The other patent, from 2001, talks about the
“method of automatically transferring content from a website to a user’s personal ‘Web
page diary’ with a click, allowing people to ‘collect interesting content as they
browsed the Web.’” Ars Technica reports about 20 patent lawsuits
were filed against Facebook last year alone. Facebook officials have yet to comment on
the latest lawsuit or the claims.