housesystem

Facebook still facing existential legal threat

Owen Thomas · 09/29/08 03:20PM

New Facebook lawyer Ted Ullyot will have his hands full. Before Mark Zuckerberg came along, every college had a facebook — a collection of pictures of the incoming freshman class, distributed in print. But now, there's only one Facebook. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard student who came up with an online facebook called HouseSystem prior to the creation of Facebook, has long disputed Zuckerberg's claim to the idea — and he's been disputing the company's name, too. Records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office now show that Greenspan's suit to cancel Facebook's trademark has resumed, having survived two motions to dismiss. The most probable outcome here: Like Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who claim they hired Zuckerberg to work on their college social network, ConnectU, Greenspan will get paid off with a piece of Facebook, too.

How Mark Zuckerberg allegedly nicked the idea of an online facebook

Nicholas Carlson · 04/16/08 05:00PM

Aaron Greenspan's Authoritas, a self-published history of his time at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, is full of passages the Facebook founder would rather you not read. In this excerpt, Greenspan recounts the moment when, as a member of Harvard's Student Entrepreneurship Council and creator of the
HouseSystem Face Book, he met a supersecretive wantrepreneur named Mark Zuckerberg.

Another Harvard student files suit over Facebook's founding

Nicholas Carlson · 04/16/08 01:20PM

Facebook lawyers won't let Think Computers founder Aaron Greenspan use the company's name to market his new self-pubished book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era . These lawyers say it would violate Facebook's trademark. So Greenspan has petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel Facebook's claim to the name. The suit rehashes Greenspan's old arguments that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stole his idea.