A patent-holding company, working together with the widow and family of a Dutch computer programmer, has sued Facebook for infringing two patents. The plaintiff, Rembrandt Social Media (part of Rembrandt IP), says its patents came from a social networking pioneer who created an early "online diary" program, and it asks the social-networking giant to pay unspecified royalties.
The complaint [PDF] spins an interesting tale of a now-deceased Dutch programmer, Joannes Jozef Everardus Van Der Meer, who was a "pioneer in the development of user-friendly Web technologies," according to the complaint filed earlier this week.
"He really created the concept of a diary on the Internet," Rembrandt's lawyer, Tom Melsheimer, told Ars. "To describe it in a general way, he had the notion of being able to publish and share information with a select group of people and the ability to link in other types of information. It was the beginnings of what we would say is social networking."
Van Der Meer founded a company called Aduna and started work on implementing the ideas in his two patents, numbers 6,289,362 and 6,415,316. During that time he registered "www.surfbook.com" but it isn't clear what, if anything, he did with it. In any case, Van Der Meer wasn't able to finish his work, as he passed away in June 2004.
Facebook didn't pop up on the scene until 2003, but "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 complaint states. Facebook lets its users arrange personal information, as well as third-party content, in a chronological format; it allows the user to share "specific diary entries with a selected group of people, such as the user's friends, through the use of user-settable privacy levels." And Facebook is powered by advertising revenue, a business model that's specifically described in the '316 patent.
Finally, Facebook allows third-party content to be moved from other websites to its own via a "share" or "like" button—again, an invention that the complaint claims Van Der Meer thought of first.
Also accused of infringing one of the patents is a 47-employee company called AddThis. The suit is filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, one of the fastest patent dockets in the country, where AddThis is located.
The lawsuit also claims Facebook knew about the Van Der Meer patents, since one of them is cited in a Facebook patent issued in 2012.
Patent-holding companies suing big Internet companies isn't unusual. About 20 patent lawsuits were filed against Facebook in 2012 alone—only one, Yahoo v. Facebook, was filed by a company that could be considered any kind of competitor.
"I would distinguish Rembrandt from other companies that buy up patents," said Melsheimer. "Rembrandt is pretty committed to the idea of finding inventors that have a compelling story to tell, and a patent that is important or core to some widely used technology." At trial, Melsheimer expects Van Der Meer's widow and some of his former colleagues to testify about the importance of his invention.
Rembrandt is also a very successful patent-holding company; it was founded in 2004 and by 2008 had raised over $150 million to pursue patents it thought looked like good investments. That allowed it to wrest a $41 million verdict from contact-lens maker Ciba Vision in 2008. That same year, Rembrandt claimed to have patent rights to both the digital-TV standard and the DOCSIS cable-modem standard, and it was accused of pretending to be in the cable-modem business itself in order to gain leverage in that case.
Rembrandt has always been able to hire top-tier legal talent to prosecute its cases; it's represented in this case by Fish & Richardson, the largest patent-centric law firm in the country.
Of course, Facebook never claimed to be the first social network. It was preceded by MySpace, Friendster, and others. It has always been the execution of ideas, not patent rights on ideas, that has caused social-media websites to rise or fall. The relevance of whatever happened at surfbook.com to modern social networking seems, to the casual observer, to be nil. Despite that, Van Der Meer's heirs—and the anonymous owner of Rembrandt IP—can now claim they have monopoly rights to an "online diary" until the year 2021.
"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," said Melsheimer. "It's not necessarily a function of bad intent or malicious planning. The notion that the original inventor didn't succeed in commercializing the invention is, legally speaking, not relevant."
Listing image by owenwbrown / flickr
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