"Like" Button Violates Patents, Claims Dutch Family
They're suing
Facebook is being sued by the family of a deceased Dutch programmer who held two patents dealing with sharing and updating social media content long before the social networking site launched.
The suit, filed Feb. 4 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, also names AddThis, a social bookmarking services that was an early partner of Facebook. The lawsuit alleges Facebook's "Like" button and other content-sharing features infringe on the patents.
The patents in question were granted in 2001 and 2002 to Joannes Jozef Everardus Van Der Meer, a computer scientist. Van Der Meer had reserved the domain name "surfbook.com" for what he termed a "personal diary" system, according to the lawsuit.