Today in international tech news: Facebook is sued by a company that says it owns the patents for Likes; broadband fans in the UK fret about what EU budget cuts will mean for rural Internet access; VLC might someday be able to stream BitTorrents; and a British tech company is under investigation for its financial reporting before it was acquired by HP.
Rembrandt Social Media is suing Facebook for its use of the Like button, according to the BBC.
Rembrandt claims that Facebook's success is owed, at least in part, to patents belonging to Dutch programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer, who died in 2004.
Facebook declined to comment, but a lawyer for Rembrandt, which owns the patents, said that the patents "represent an important foundation of social media."
A lawsuit has been filed in a federal court in Virginia by Rembrandt Social Media.
"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 lawyer Tom Melsheimerfrom legal firm Fish and Richardson, which represents the patent holder.
Rembrandt now owns patents for technologies Mr Van Der Meer used to build a fledgling social network, called Surfbook, before his death in 2004.
Mr Van Der Meer was granted the patents in 1998, five years before Facebook first appeared.
Surfbook was a social diary that let people share information with friends and family and approve some data using a "like" button, according to legal papers filed by Fish and Richardson.
The papers also say Facebook is aware of the patents as it has cited them in its own applications to patent some social networking technologies.
Also cited in the same legal claim was another social media company called Add This.
Image. Source : http://www.bbc.co.uk
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