Facebook Lawsuit: Dorm Room Chit Chat Does Not Equal a Contract
Published by Rodney Rumford July 25th, 2007 in Facebook, Facebook News.
A Boston judge indicated today that he is likely to dismiss a claim that one of the founders of the social networking website, Facebook, stole the idea from fellow students. But the Boston district court judge, Douglas Woodlock, delayed a ruling, saying he needed more information from the parties to make a final decision.
The lawsuit against Facebook was brought by another social networking website, ConnectU, the owners of which allege that Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who helped set up Facebook, stole the idea, technology, design and business plan. They were all students at Harvard University at the time. The judge said that “he needed more information about allegations that Mark Zuckerberg stole the ideas of the creators of a rival social networking website.”
Facebook is seeking to have parts of the claim, lodged three years ago, fully dismissed. The website was launched in February 2004, a few months before ConnectU, and is now the 6th most popular website online with over 30+ million members.
The judge in the case gave the ConnectU founders, brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, until August 8 to come up with more information to substantiate their claims. He repeatedly asked their lawyers to provide details of the contract they say they had with Mr Zuckerberg while at Harvard. “Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract,” the judge said.
So we will have to wait until Aug 8th to get Judge Woodlock’s final decision. If you had a contract; you surely would would have it at this hearing. This looks good for Facebook. There was no mention of an NDA or written contract existing that I am aware of.
I can tell you that I have had many conversations/idea sharing over dinner/drinks with people and they implemented the ideas discussed; this does not mean they stole them. 
What do you think?
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook lawsuit, connectu, facebook legal
I think this is just another case of “you’re one of the hottest internet companies in a long time and im going to try to get a piece somehow.” =)
It’s funny how the lawsuit came about AFTER the release of the Facebook platform. Or am i wrong?
Actually this lawsuit was filed a few years back. Bottom line is it looks like they don’t have any good written documentation for their case. I suspect this case will be resolved at the next hearing.
Thanks for the clarification.
Has it been an ongoing battle, or has facebook just recently started trying to get this dismissed? It seems like cleaning up any legal messes would be a common thing to do before an IPO, so I wonder if this is yet another indication that they are going to go public?
Regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit, I think it is lame that zuckerberg stole the idea from someone else and didn’t try to work with them instead. Even if they can’t legally prove it, he obviously was influenced by ConnectU. For everyone claiming zuckerberg is a genius, this is proof that he’s not even creative enough to generate the concept behind facebook. If he wasn’t a rich kid from harvard, facebook would be nothing today.
There’s very little doubt that Jared was influenced by ConnectU, but it’s unfair to say that he’s not creative enough to come up with the ideas that continue to make Facebook great.
Almost every great idea has a sore loser on the other end who failed to act quickly enough on their ideas.
It’s .1% inspiration and 99.9% perspiration. I’m guessing the ConnectU guys are jerks and that whatever they had going on blew up, so Zuckerberg started FB, and won. Oh well. Even if Zuckerberg and the ConnectU guys sat around and had lengthy discussions about this idea, it was still Zuckerberg who went out there and made it happen. It’s really hard to do, and to continue to grow it like he has means that he’s doing a good job. I’m guessing the ConnectU guys will lose. If I were them, I’d settle for a bunch of FB stock and wait around for the IPO.
Actually, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are the rich kids. They spend their time training for the US Rowing team using Daddy’s money.
Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to get rich off an idea that he ran with after these two clowns, who were more concerned with making it to Crew practice, probably dropped the ball.
Has anyone ever checked out ConnectU.com? It is… not impressive. In fact, Facebook was more impressive in 2004 than ConnectU is right now. Also, Zuckerberg was the guy they were getting to program their thing for free–meaning that he was doing all the coding and grunt work anyway.