Court may shut down Facebook

By THIS IS MONEY
Updated: 05:53 EST, 25 July 2007

A court in the US could today shut down Facebook, the social networking website that has become a worldwide phenomenon.

The owners of a rival social networking site are due to present evidence to a Boston court that Facebook's founder stole their ideas while they were students at Harvard university.

The three founders of ConnectU say Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook after working with them on another similar project. Their lawsuit alleges fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. It asks the court to shut down Facebook and give control of the company and its assets to ConnectU's founders.

Facebook was launched in 2004, a few months before ConnectU, and now has 31m users compared with about 70,000 users for ConnectU. Last year, Facebook turned down a $1bn offer from Yahoo.

In submissions to the court, Facebook's lawyers say ConnectU has no evidence for 'broad-brush allegations' against Zuckerberg, and deny he stole ideas for Facebook from fellow Harvard students. 'Each of them had different interests and activities. Only one of them had an idea significant enough to build a great company. That one person was Mark Zuckerberg,' the lawyers state.

Facebook and ConnectU allow users to post profiles with pictures, biographies and other personal information and create extended networks of people at their schools or jobs or with similar interests.

ConnectU originally began a legal action in September 2004, but it was dismissed on a technicality in March. The new lawsuit claims that in December 2002 ConnectU founders, brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra began to develop a social networking site for the Harvard community called Harvard Connection.

In November 2003, the three asked Zuckerberg to complete software and database work on the site. They repeatedly asked him to finish before they graduated in June 2004, and Zuckerberg assured them he was working hard to complete it, the lawsuit says.

'Such statements were false and Zuckerberg never intended to provide the code and instead intended to breach his promise ... and intended to steal the idea for the Harvard Connection website, and in fact he did so,' the suit alleges.

Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook.com in February 2004. ConnectU started its web site in May of that year. By beating ConnectU to the market, Facebook gained a huge advantage, the lawsuit claims.