Facebook - did he or didn’t he?
July 25th, 2007 by Lloyd Gofton
Mark Zuckerberg, or Mr Facebook, has been accused of fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets, by his former employers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of ConnectU.
They allege that Mark Zuckerberg stole their site’s software code while he was working for them on a project called Harvard Connection, creating a social network for Harvard university’s students.
In the suit they claim Zuckerberg was asked to complete software and database work on the site before they graduated from Harvard in June 2004.
According to the suit this never happened, and in an almighty claim they have demanded ownership of Facebook!
Let’s put this into context, ConnectU has 70,000 users, while Facebook has 52 million. Facebook launched 3 months before ConnectU, and Facebook was the subject of a $1bn approach from Yahoo! in the not too distant past, a valuation that has significantly risen due to the increasing popularity of the service.
You have to ask yourself, if ConnectU are right, and Facebook is based on the same code, what has Zuckerberg done to make Facebook so much more successful?
I don’t think Facebook will be unduly concerned by the eventual ruling.
MediaGuardian has the full story.
