Facebook Assets Frozen by NY Judge: Who Owns Facebook?
NEW YORK (CBS) A recent lawsuit claims that the real owner of Facebook, the nation's largest social networking site, is not 26-year-old Harvard grad Mark Zuckerberg, but rather a wood-pellet fuel businessman from upstate New York, and a New York state judge has frozen Facebook's assets until the results from the paternity test come in.
Wood-pellet fuel? What the what?
According to a lawsuit filed in Allegany County in late June, Paul D. Ceglia claims that Zuckerberg came to him in April 2003 with an idea for a "live functioning yearbook" for the students of Harvard University and asked Ceglia to pay him $1,000 in exchange for a 50 percent share in the finished product. Ceglia also claims that there was a stipulation allowing for an additional 1 percent share for every day after the Jan. 1, 2004 due date until the site was finished, the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the lawsuit, the site was finished on Feb. 4, 2004, which allows for an additional 34 percent share, bringing Ceglia's total stake in Facebook to a majority 84 percent.
Attorneys for Zuckerberg and Facebook have called the lawsuit "completely frivolous" and said that they plan to fight the lawsuit "vigorously." To that end they have requested that the lawsuit be transferred from state court to federal court, but not before a state court judge froze the company's assets.
The contract that Ceglia included in his lawsuit names himself as the "purchaser" and Zuckerberg as the "contractor/seller" in an agreement to develop "the project Seller [Zuckerberg] has already initiated that is designed to offer the students of Harvard university [sic] access to a wesite [sic] similar to a live functioning yearbook with the working title of 'The Face Book,'" the Journal reported.
Ceglia is no stranger to the courtroom, according to the Journal. Last year New York's Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo accused Ceglia of defrauding customers of his wood-pellet fuel company in Allegany County. The state claimed that he took more than $200,000 from consumers and then failed to deliver any products or refunds. The wood-pellet case is ongoing.