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.
Van Der Meer formed a company called AIdministrator Nederland, known as Aduna, with the intent of commercializing his ideas. He died, however, in June 2004. Since then, his widow and family have pursued compensation for his inventions, the lawsuit said.
"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 lawsuit states.