Facebook’s Impending Lawsuit
July 16, 2007 |
A long debate over how Facebook began is continuing in court, as the founders of social community ConnectU, continue their ongoing lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook. Apparently, before he created Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg worked with a few friends on a project called HarvardConnect.com that also was attempting to connect college students and alumni.
Zuckerberg ended up leaving that project, and eventually released Facebook, and the rest is history, with his Facebook touted to be worth more than $1 billion.Brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have accused Facebook's CEO of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he briefly worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer, which led to their lawsuit against him three years ago. Now, they have changed their company’s name to ConnectU, and the turmoil continues.
In fact, the ConnectU founders go on to suggest that Facebook be shut down and that full control of the site, and its profits be turned over to them. Facebook has denied these allegations, and Mark Zuckerberg has even filed another suit against ConnectU claiming unfair business practices and business torts. It makes you wonder who is telling the truth?
Zuckerberg has publicly stated that he was "intrigued" by ConnectU, but found that he was "subjected to demands on my time without truly being made a part of the development team." Even still, the case hasn’t gone away, and now that Facebook's worth has increased, there is a lot more to be lost if the allegations are true. VentureBeat believes that the worst case scenario for Facebook is that Zuckerberg and his investors will agree to settle this for many millions of dollars.
Whether he stole code or not, we know that Zuckerberg was, in fact, associated with the ConnectU founders before he started Facebook. What code, if any, did he write for them? Also, were there legal and binding contract involved between the friends or was it a lot of oral agreements to go into business together? What do you think? Is Facebook's future doomed?
Under what laws are they suing him? Do they have a patent on some technology or business practice?
Unless Facebook published the code somewhere (highly unlikely) then how does the copyright part of the suit hold up?
"Misappropriation of trade secrets" sounds possible, but very difficult to prove, especially if, like most college dorms, things were pretty open and loose, which would undermine the "trade secret" part. I doubt breach of actual or implied contracts will hold up under scrutiny.
IANAL, but overall it sounds like they've some ethical complaints that don't translate well to legal complaints, but I'd bet they'll get bought off. If this goes to trial, I would hope it gets thrown out. If this is the level of legal hurdle that has to be cleared for a succesful suit, basically every business can and will be sued.