Paul D. Ceglia has filed a lawsuit in a New York Court alleging that he owns 84% of Facebook and, although Facebook is trying to dismiss it as a frivolous lawsuit, the Judge has found it to have enough entity to order a freeze in all asset transactions for Facebook. The issue arises from an allegation made by the plaintiff (claimant in England) that the current Facebook CEO, Zuckerberg, was paid U$S1000 to build the site, on which Ceglia kept 50% of the interest that grew 1% per day from January 1st 2004 until the day of completion, February 4th 2004. This implies that Ceglia owns 84% of the resulting site.
It is not the first time that Zuckerberg and Facebook get involved into legal trouble originated in him taking either the idea, the code or, in this case, the whole company from somebody’s creativity (besides other cases for many other reasons). Settling this out of court will not help in convincing the more than 500 million users, most of whom are young, that rules are supposed to be complied with and that respecting others’ IP rights is needed...