Facebook founder likely stole site idea

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(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-02-13 07:43

A law firm has let slip that Facebook paid $65 million to settle a suit charging that founder Mark Zuckerberg swiped the idea for the website from former college roommates.

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges law firm boasted in a January advertising brochure about outcomes of an array of cases it handled last year, among them a $65-million settlement from Facebook.

The Recorder, a California legal publication popular among lawyers and judges, on Wednesday published a story about the leak.

Quinn Emanuel lawyers represented ConnectU in a lawsuit that ended in a settlement endorsed by a federal judge in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose last June.

The financial terms of the settlement were edited from court documents and not disclosed by Facebook.

"We can't comment on a confidential agreement," Facebook said in a written response when asked to comment.

ConnectU creators Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claimed that they enlisted Zuckerberg to finish software code for their social-networking website while they were all students at Harvard in 2003.

Zuckerberg, a second year student at the time, took their code and their idea and launched Facebook in February of 2004 instead of holding up his end of the deal, according to ConnectU's lawsuit.

Facebook and ConnectU founders, in the company of lawyers and advisors, negotiated a settlement that includes Facebook buying ConnectU for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock, according to court documents.

A condition of the deal is that all parties keep details confidential or pay a multi-million-dollar penalty.