Will Facebook Settle the ConnectU Litigation?

Posted by Eriq Gardner

According to the NY Times, Facebook is close to settling its legal troubles with ConnectU with hopes of putting an embarrassing episode behind them.

Started by several Harvard classmates of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, ConnectU sued Facebook in Massachusetts federal court, claiming that Zuckerberg stole the idea behind his popular website after working on a campus dating project started by ConnectU founders called Harvard Connection.

Facebook retaliated with an unfair business practices lawsuit in U.S. District Court in California that claimed that ConnectU-employed programmers had hacked into Facebook in 2004 in order to obtain e-mail addresses that it could use for ConnectU invitations. Things got pretty ugly when last year, personal documents from Zuckerberg's Harvard past surfaced in connection with the lawsuit.

By July, things didn't look to be going so well for ConnectU. But the courtroom battle figured to be a nasty preppies-gone-wild showdown that surely would have aroused a great deal of media interest.

The Times says that motions to dismiss the cases are expected to be filed “within weeks.”