A legal dispute over whether Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, stole the idea for the wildly successful social-networking site from fellow students at Harvard University is on the verge of settlement, according to a report on The New York Times’s Bits blog.
An anonymous source told The Times that the founders of ConnectU, a social-networking site that sued Facebook in 2004, is prepared to settle the case for undisclosed terms.
While Mr. Zuckerberg was an undergraduate at Harvard, he worked briefly as a programmer for ConnectU’s founders, and they allege that he quit the project abruptly and used their ideas in Facebook (originally called thefacebook.com) before ConnectU opened its doors. —Jeffrey R. Young
