A Piece of The Facebook Pie

I'm an avid fan of Attack of the Show on G4TV and last night, their "The Loop" segment featured a new book called The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. The Author of the book (Mezrich) was interviewed, and during the said segment, he mentioned how Facebook, a multi-billion dollar website, had started from a College prank.

The site, according to Mezrich, began as a "Who's HOT, Who's NOT" page on the campus server at Harvard which included ID pictures of female students taken from their student files. The two founders of Facbook apparently managed to hack into the Harvard system and access the students' profiles. (Both were close to expulsion after the site almost crashed the whole network)

The site grew upon the suggestion of two jocks who paid the Facebook co-founders a certain amount to design a "dating page" to get more girls. Zuckerberg decided to steal the jocks' idea rather than design the webpage they asked for. He integrated the "dating" facet into the "Who's HOT, Who's NOT" page, and the rest is history.

Eventually, trouble would brew when Zuckerberg, already a multi-billionaire, was sued by both the jocks (whom they had stolen the idea from) and his co-founder. A multi-million dollar settlement ended the first case. Eduardo Saverin, the alleged co-founder, has now been acknowledged by Zuckerberg.

Come to think of it, a complicated site like Facebook could not have been set-up by Zuckerberg alone. There must be dozens of people out there who, in some way, contributed to what the site is today. Do all these people deserve a slice of the billion-dollar pie?

The truth is, intellectual property, though very much prevalent in law and society, is still a concept with blurry edges. Where do you draw the line of originality? When an intellectual property case involves large amounts of money, how fair is fair? Can someone legally take all the credit for something which several, dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people established?

Such questions are to complicated to answer. It might be better to start a new website. Who knows; it could just be the next silicon valley empire!