Facebook sued over Like button

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."

Van Der Meer, who was awarded the patents in 1998, launched his own (unsuccessful) social network: Surfbook, a "social diary" that, according to Rembrandt's attorneys, allowed people to share information and approve data with a Like button.

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.