Web designer files lawsuit claiming he owns 84% of Facebook



Paul Ceglia has filed a lawsuit against Facebook

A web designer is taking Facebook to court claiming he owns 84 per cent of the social networking site.

Paul Ceglia has filed a civil lawsuit in the Supreme Court in New York claiming he signed a contract with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2003 to develop and design a website.

According to the suit, the terms of the contract entitled Ceglia to a $1,000 fee and a 50 percent stake in the product, which eventually was launched as thefacebook.com.

The contract also stipulated that Ceglia ’would acquire an additional 1 percent interest in the business, per day, until the website was completed,’ meaning that Ceglia's stake in Facebook totaled 84 percent by 2004.

Facebook has described the suit as completely frivolous.

The firm's lawyers are contesting a decision by a New York judge to issue a temporary restraining the transfer of Facebook assets while the lawsuit is assessed.

'The order will not affect our ability to do business but we do not believe it is legally supported and we have moved to have it vacated,' said Facebook's Barry Schnitt.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is having to fight another suit claiming he owes fellow designers money

According to The Wall Street Journal, the contract is ‘for the purchase and design of a suitable website for the project Seller [Mr. 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.'"

Facebook, which has nearly 500 million users, is the world's biggest internet social networking site and ranks among the web's most popular sites, alongside Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

The date of Ceglia's suit clashes with Facebook’s official history which claims that Zuckerberg did not start the site until after 2003.

Some of the previous accounts of Facebook's history have said that Zuckerberg was at work on other projects during that period and did not come up with the idea for Facebook until later.

The internet domain name for "TheFacebook.com" was registered in January 2004,

Zuckerberg is believed to own 24% of the company, with the rest belonging to employees and investors.

Last year it was reported that Zuckerberg paid out $65 million to two former classmates to end a lawsuit claiming that he stole the idea for the massively successful social networking site from them.