Lawyers for Facebook will argue on Wednesday for the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing its founder of stealing the idea for the popular social-networking website from his fellow students at Harvard.


A hearing in the case is scheduled on Wednesday before Judge Douglas Woodlock in a federal court in Boston.


The struggling website ConnectU alleges in its lawsuit that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was hired to write a computer program but never delivered the work and instead created Facebook using their concept.


ConnectU says its creators were Harvard University students when they assigned Zuckerberg in 2003 to write code for their website, which at that time was called Harvard Connection.


Instead of delivering the promised code in January 2004, Zuckerberg allegedly registered the "Facebook" domain name and a month later launched the website as a social networking forum for people at universities, according to ConnectU lawyer Daniel Tigne.


ConnectU hired someone to do the work Zuckerberg left undone and launched its website in May of that year, with Facebook having "usurped" the advantage of being first to market, Tigne said in court documents.


Accusations in a suit Tigne filed against Zuckerberg and Facebook in May of this year include fraud, copyright infringement, breach of contract, and misappropriation of trade secrets.


The lawsuit asks the federal court to close Facebook, strip its assets and make the firm pay ConnectU cash damages yet to be determined.


Zuckerberg, Facebook and other employees named as defendants in the suit deny the charges and are asking that the case be dismissed.


The case is little more than an outdated "dispute between several Harvard students," Facebook attorney Steven Bauer said in a written motion to have the lawsuit thrown out.


"None of them were paid. Each of them had different interests and activities," Bauer wrote in the motion.


"Only one of them had an idea significant enough to build a great company. That one person was Mark Zuckerberg."


Facebook's popularity has surged worldwide since it began allowing users to customize web pages with their own computer applications and expanded its membership beyond academia.


The monthly tally of visitors to the Palo Alto, California-based Facebook's website rose nearly 90 percent in May to an estimated 26.6 million visitors, according to industry tracking firm comScore.


Internet titan Yahoo offered to buy Facebook last year for a billion dollars, but Zuckerberg refused to sell.






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