Michael McKibben, founder of Ohio-based Leader Technologies, said that his son attended Harvard at the same time Zuckerberg was a student there. He alleges that Zuckerberg got access to a white paper dealing with certain technological advances that McKibben emailed to his son. “I believe when Zuckerberg hacked into servers at Harvard, he got a copy of the white paper,” McKibben told CNBC.
“Facebook stole our invention, and we’d like it back,” said McKibben. “As far as I’m concerned, our investors, who’ve been with us for a long time, deserve a payday.”
That payday could be significant – if the patent case is successful, millions of dollars in Facebook’s revenue could be at stake. Facebook has already settled the most famous case alleging Zuckerberg stole someone else’s idea: paying his fellow Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss a reported $65 million in cash and stock. That prolonged fight was famously portrayed in the movie “The Social Network.”