Patent-holding company Rembrandt Social Media and the family of a deceased Dutch computer programmer, who was a pioneer in the development of "user-friendly Web-based technologies", are suing Facebook.
Programmer Jozef Everardus Van Der Meer died in 2004, but the current patent suit refers to two patent applications he filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office in 1998 and which were granted in 2001 and 2002, respectively. According to the suit, much of Facebook's functionality bears a "remarkable resemblance" to Van Der Meer's work.
The first of the patents is entitled "Method and Apparatus for Implementing a Web Page Diary" and is described as "a novel technology that gave ordinary people - those without training in the computer arts - the ability to create and use what Van Der Meer called a personal diary and what today would be called 'social media' on the World Wide Web".
According to the application, Van Der Meer's "personal diary" would allow people to collect personal and third-party content, organise the information chronologically on a personalised Web page, and share the information with a selected group of people through the use of customisable privacy settings.
The second patent to which the lawsuit refers, and which concerns Facebook's "Like" and "Share" buttons, is titled "System and Method for Generation, Transferring and Using an Annotated Universal Address". Van Der Meer's patent refers to the technologies that "enabled the automatic transfer, at a user's request, of third-party content from a content provider's Web site to the user's personal diary page".
Both patents were issued to Van Der Meer, and he registered the domain "www.surfbook.com" and launched a pilot project to implement his ideas, but he died "before he could realise his vision".
Rembrandt Social Media (which is part of Rembrandt IP) is now working with the Van Der Meer family to achieve "the credit and compensation that his inventions - and his pioneering work in the field of social media - deserved."
The complaint states: "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."
The infringing Facebook features cited in the case include the manner in which the social network allows users to arrange personal and third-party content, in a chronological order on their pages and set the privacy settings for this. It is also claimed that Facebook's advertising model uses the technology described in the second Van Der Meer patent. The movement of third-party content via the "Like" and "Share" button is also seen as an infringement of this patent.
While questions have been raised over why the Van Der Meer family and Rembrandt have waited this long to pursue this case, the strength of the claim has been boosted by the fact that a Facebook patent in 2012 actually made reference to one of Van Der Meer's patents - showing the social network was aware of it. Along with Facebook, online bookmarking service AddThis is also named in the suit for violating the patent that refers to the sharing of third-party content to the 'personal diary page'.
Rembrandt has a reputation as being a successful patent-holding company. In 2008, it won a $41 million patent suit against contact lens maker, Ciba Vision. The company prides itself on helping inventors and patent owners "who often do not have the requisite capital or expertise" to enforce their rights. In this case, Rembrandt says it is seeking "reasonable" royalties until 2021.
Speaking to Ars Technica, Rembrandt's lawyer Tom Melsheimer, says: "The way the patent laws work, and have worked for 200 years, is that when someone else uses it ? whether intentionally or unintentionally ? they owe a reasonable royalty. It's not necessarily a function of bad intent or malicious planning. The notion that the original inventor didn't succeed in commercialising the invention is, legally speaking, not relevant.
"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 based on the evidence," says Melsheimer.
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