Facebook reportedly will settle ConnectU lawsuit
According to the New York Times, the years-long legal tiff is close to an end. Motions to dismiss the intellectual-property case may be just weeks away.
You're likely to be disappointed, those of you who were secretly hoping for an over-the-top, preppies-gone-nasty legal battle between Facebook's founders and the former Harvard classmates who claimed they filched their business plan.
According to Brad Stone of the New York Times, Facebook is reportedly close to settling the lawsuit that the founders of onetime social-networking site ConnectU have been pursuing for several years now.
According to the founders of ConnectU, twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their business partner Divya Narendra, they hired current Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a programmer for ConnectU when they were all students at Harvard. Zuckerberg, they claimed, stalled on his work at ConnectU as he created his own social-networking site, which then became Facebook. The ConnectU founders
Facebook has retorted with allegations that ConnectU's suit is unfounded--as well as a countersuit claiming that ConnectU mined Facebook's user data to recruit more members. Indeed, the outlook has not been favorable for ConnectU, as a judge indicated in July that the side simply didn't have the evidence to back up its claims.
Thanks to his success with Facebook, Zuckerberg is now the youngest member of Forbes magazine's annual list of billionaires; ConnectU is largely forgotten, as Narendra now works in finance in New York and the Winklevoss twins are vying for spots on the U.S. Olympic crew team.
The Times blog post on Monday did not provide much detail, but said that Facebook was "finalizing a settlement" with the ConnectU founders and that legal documents pertaining to the case dismissal should appear within a few weeks.