Facebook faces litigation over design concept

By: David Hale

Posted: 10/6/04

Students who spend hours putting off schoolwork while searching through profiles on TheFacebook.com may soon be forced to crack open their textbooks.

The popular student-based networking site may be forced to shut down after creator Mark Zuckerberg was sued by the founders of a rival Web site. Tyler Winklevoss, Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, founders of ConnectU.com, filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Sept. 2, claiming that Zuckerberg breached his oral contract with the group and used ConnectU's source code to launch his own site.

"The whole point of the lawsuit is to right a wrong," Tyler Winklevoss said. "Basically, we want to get back what is ours, and what we deserve."

Winklevoss and his partners first envisioned in the winter of 2002 a Web site where students could post personal profiles and pictures as a way to improve the social life at Harvard University, Winklevoss said. Since none of them were experienced programmers, they enlisted several other Harvard students to help with the logistics and in November 2003, they approached Zuckerberg for assistance.

Winklevoss said that his group discussed details for the site and exchanged vital information with Zuckerberg under the assumption of an oral agreement "that he would become part of the team in exchange for a share of the benefits, glory, fame and money that would have occurred with the site's success."

In addition to the charges that he stole their source code, the lawsuit claims Zuckerberg failed to complete work he claimed to have done, resulting in a delayed launch of the site and significant monetary losses to ConnectU.

"Mark's deception and misrepresentation of work cost us 66 days," Winklevoss said, "while he claims to have completed his Web site in just a week."

TheFacebook.com was launched in February 2004 and now boasts nearly 300,000 users from about 100 colleges across the country. ConnectU, which launched in May, has only about 16,000 users.

Before filing the lawsuit, the group attempted to have the Harvard University administration resolve the issue, claiming Zuckerberg had broken the school's code of conduct. Although Zuckerberg had run into problems at Harvard in the past for using copyrighted pictures on another of his Web sites, school President Lawrence Summers decided the ConnectU case was outside the university's jurisdiction, forcing Winklevoss and his partners to pursue the lawsuit.

"That is really the most disappointing thing in this whole saga," Winklevoss said. "Harvard just doesn't care and this is nothing new for Harvard."

The ConnectU founders think their site will give students a greater ability to network, pointing to several key differences between their site and TheFacebook.com, including blogs, forums and a book exchange. The ConnectU site also offers users the ability to obtain profile information and interact with students at other colleges, an option not available on Zuckerberg's site.

"It's far more interactive and less static," Winklevoss said. "That's the whole idea. It's supposed to break down the walls."

While TheFacebook.com has enjoyed popularity at Syracuse, sophomore geography major Nicole Cofrin said she enjoys using the site but understands why the lawsuit was filed.

"If (Zuckerberg) did rip off someone else's idea, I'd be in favor of shutting the site down," she said.

Freshman marketing major Greg Ackerman, another TheFacebook.com user, thinks the whole lawsuit is much ado about nothing.

"It shouldn't matter, everyone's just trying to make friends," he said. "They're just trying to help kids out."

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, Winklevoss intends to make ConnectU a success, even if that means sharing the customer base with Zuckerberg.

"We're moving on," he said. "We'll spend as little time on the lawsuit as we can. The product will continue to grow and that's what we want to focus most of our energy on."

Zuckerberg and TheFacebook.com staff did not return interview requests for this story, but told the Boston Globe in September that they planned to file a countersuit against ConnectU for defamation of character.