June 26th, 2008
A Face-Saving Win for Facebook
Earlier this week, I wrote about a big issue confronting Facebook “legal battle over whether Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ripped off Harvard classmates in launching his social-networking Web site,” as the San Jose Mercury News summarized it.
Well, Facebook got a big win in a California courtroom when a “federal judge in San Jose late Wednesday rejected a bid by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime adversaries to reopen a recent confidential settlement in a case,” the Mercury News reports.
“The principals of ConnectU, who claimed that Zuckerberg stole source code and ideas from them while they all were attending Harvard, were hoping to revisit a confidential settlement reached Feb. 22, based on new evidence that it said had surfaced in Zuckerberg’s instant message logs,” according to the paper’s latest story.
“But Judge James Ware rejected their bid, issuing his ruling two days after a hearing Monday that he ordered closed to the press. … Ware rejected ConnectU’s claims that Facebook had committed securities fraud in procuring the settlement … (and the judge) appeared to concur with a Massachusetts judge who portrayed ConnectU’s attempt to undo the settlement as ‘buyer’s remorse.’ ”
This still doesn’t change my opinion that Facebook and MySpace are overhyped by people who seem to have a singular goal of convincing the world that social networking sites are a really big deal in—and the clear future of—recruiting.
That remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Facebook can get on with its business life without a potential company-killing legal action hanging over its head.
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This story really intrigued me and reminds me of this quote.
“There are no original ideas. There are only original people.”
Zuckerberg hit the sweet spot of personality, cultural hype, and engaging technology. I could care less about Facebook, but I really like the tools and applications that are emerging from Web 2.0 sites.
Posted by: laurie ruettimann | June 26th, 2008 at 2:35 pm