Facebook sued over social media patents
A US company has sued Facebook for allegedly infringing two patents protecting “core aspects of social media”.
Rembrandt Social Media, which helps IP owners to enforce their rights, filed the suit at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on February 4. The company has demanded unspecified damages and a permanent injunction.
The company’s ‘316 patent, issued in 2002, protects a method for allowing people to organise information chronologically on a personalised web page and share that information with a selected group of people. The ‘362 patent, granted in 2001, allows the transfer of third-party content to the personalised diary page.
The patent's inventor is a deceased Dutch individual, Joannes van der Meer, whose family partnered with Rembrandt after his death. Rembrandt says it owns the patents.
The suit says Facebook allows people to create similar personalised pages to those invented by van der Meer, presenting them using features such as the wall, timeline and news feed. It adds that the social media site allows people to transfer content from other sites, by using the like and share buttons.
“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 suit says.
Paul Schneck, Rembrandt’s chairman, added that van der Meer conceived of, and patented, the “core aspects of social media” that Facebook has allegedly infringed.
Tom Melsheimer, principal at Fish & Richardson LLP and counsel for Rembrandt, said he believed the claims in van der Meer’s patents were foundational, adding: “I expect the defendants to claim that the patents are not infringed, they are not valid and not worth much."
Melsheimer said he expected the Eastern District of Virginia, which is known for deciding cases quickly, to fast-track the suit for a jury to rule on later this year.
He added: “We haven’t looked at any other potential defendants but we won’t rule it out.”
Rembrandt has also sued AddThis, a company providing bookmarking services and helping Facebook to enhance the functionality of its like and share services.
The suit says Facebook has directly infringed both the ‘316 and ‘362 patents, and should pay unspecified damages, which should be tripled owing to wilful infringement. Rembrandt also wants a permanent injunction. The suit adds that both Facebook and AddThis have directly infringed the ‘362 patent, but only Facebook wilfully. The company wants a permanent injunction.
The suit is available here.
Facebook did not immediately respond to comment.
