Legal News

Facebook Back in Court Amid Claims of Code Theft

By Dan Slater

A couple years ago, the New Yorker ran a profile of wunderkind Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The piece chronicled Facebook’s genesis, and told the inspiring tale of how Zuckerberg forewent his winter-break at Harvard to hang around campus during freshman year. During those weeks he ginned up a social networking site for his classmates. In a matter of months he found himself in California, a Harvard dropout, and the rest is history.

But some of that history is still being dredged up — in court. On Monday, Zuckerberg & Co. (here, the “Co.” is a gaggle of Orrick lawyers) appeared in a San Jose federal court to defend the company against claims by Zuckerberg’s old Harvard classmates that he stole their ideas and code to start Facebook. Here’s the story from the San Jose Mercury News.

The case, brought a while back by the creators of ConnectU, a dating site, settled for an undisclosed amount. But now they claim they found new evidence, and argue that the case should be reopened. At Monday’s hearing, Judge James Ware reportedly barred the public from the courtroom at Facebook’s request.

“The worst case scenario is that Facebook doesn’t own its core code and that it’s been using someone else’s code for the foundation of its company. That could lead to damages that are catastrophic,” Eric Goldman, Santa Clara U. law prof, told the Merc. “In the worst case scenario, this could be a fight for Facebook’s life.” Facebook, which attracted 123.9 million unique visitors in May, recently eclipsed MySpace as the world’s most popular social-networking site, as measured by comScore.

At the time of ConnectU’s original lawsuit, Facebook countersued, accusing ConnectU of hacking into and stealing Facebook data. Separately, Facebook is also contesting a trademark suit by another Harvard classmate.

On Monday, Facebook attorney Neel Chatterjee was reportedly accompanied by 10 colleagues from his firm, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe. ConnectU’s side included attorneys from IP firm Finnegan Henderson, as well as attorneys from Boies Schiller & Flexner.

After the hearing, ConnectU attorney James Hornick said the judge indicated he may deliver a ruling before summer is over.

Photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 25, 2008 (boomark / email).