Facebook Inc. and its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted some factual allegations in a lawsuit by a western New York man who says a 2003 contract entitles him to half of Zuckerberg's Facebook holdings, while calling the suit as a whole "a fraud on the court."
In an answer filed Thursday in federal court in Buffalo, N.Y., Facebook and Zuckerberg admitted that the two men met in the lobby of a Boston hotel in April 2003 and that Zuckerberg, then a Harvard University student, was paid for work he did after responding to an online job listing for StreetFax.com, a company Paul Ceglia was trying to start at the time. Ceglia says Zuckerberg defrauded him by lying about the early success of "The Face Book" at Harvard. Ceglia says he is entitled to part ownership of Facebook, a closely held company worth as much as $55 billion, according to Sharespost.com, an online marketplace for investment |