Facebook Founder Accused of Stealing Idea for Site

July 20, 2007 — -- A federal judge will consider next week whether to throw out a lawsuit that accuses Facebook.com founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for the popular social networking site from three of his former Harvard classmates.

The lawsuit, originally filed in 2004, claims that Zuckerberg stole the idea, the source code and the business plan for Facebook in 2003 while working as a programmer for three former Harvard students, who were developing their own social networking site, now called ConnectU.com.

The July 25 hearing comes amid widespread speculation that there may be another top-dollar bid for Facebook, which reportedly rejected a nearly $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo! last year. Facebook had nearly 28 million unique visitors as of June, up from 14 million in September, according to ComScore.

The 23-year-old Zuckerberg has said publicly that he plans to keep the company private. But, the lawsuit, if it survives the motion to dismiss, could disrupt any potential sale or initial public offering, because buyers or investors may be reluctant to get involved with a company facing ongoing litigation, analysts said.

That reluctance could create pressure to settle the case, said Eric Goldman, academic director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. "A good reason to settle is because you want to present a clean company to a potential buyer," he said.

Douglas McIntyre, editor of 24/7 Wall St., a financial news and opinion Web site, said, "Having a pending lawsuit that says the source code doesn't belong to the company makes it virtually impossible to do anything."

"This makes it imperative that they get the thing resolved," said McIntyre. "It's gone from a dirty, little secret to being, in the tech world, front-page news. It's clearly poisoned the well."

ConnectU's founders, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, are asking for unspecified damages, including any profits that Zuckerberg made from using their ideas and they are asking to have control of Facebook turned over to them.

"Facebook would not exist if not for [the] fact that he obtained our clients' source code, worked on our clients' Web site and got the idea of creating his own site, without telling them," said ConnectU lawyer John Hornick.