James Delahunty
11 Feb 2013 13:33
Facebook sued over its 'Like' button.
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Virginia by global law firm Fish & Richardson, on behalf of Rembrandt Social Media. The lawsuit involves two patents originally issues to "Jos" van der Meer, who is now deceased.
Rembrandt now owns patents that va Der Meer used in constructing a social network called Surfbook. He died in 2004, the same year that Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg. Rembrandt alleges that Facebook, and another firm called Add This, has used two patents without permission.
"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," said attorney Tom Melsheimer, counsel for Rembrandt and managing principal of Fish & Richardson's Dallas office.