Facebook names Canadian Sex Site in its Lawsuit

The online social networking directory Facebook named a Canadian pornographic website operator as a defendant in a law-suit alleging that the firm illegally attempted to obtain user information.

The suit originally was filed in federal court in San Jose, California in June against 10 unknown individuals and 10 unknown companies for unlawfully accessing company’s servers. The lawsuit was updated by Facebook on December 12, naming three individuals and three companies.

In its legal filing, the company has named three men Brian Fabian, Josh Raskin, and Ming Wu as well as the three companies, 1564476 Ontario Limited, Istra Holdings Inc., and an Ontario-based adult entertainment company that conducts business under the
name SlickCash, among the defendants. At least 14 remaining defendants have yet to be named.

Based on information subpoenaed from two Internet service providers Look Communications and Rogers Communications, Facebook alleged the Canadian company specializing in Internet porn has hacked the popular social networking website's computers and tried to access the personal information of its users.

The adult-oriented sex site SlickCash, which is associated with 1564476 Ontario Limited and Istra Holdings, is described by the Internet metrics company Quantcast as a “top 1,000 site that reaches over 2.7 million U.S. monthly uniques."

In the complaint, Facebook alleges that between June 1 and June 15 this year the defendants sent 200,000 separate requests to Facebook, attempting to direct its computers to forward them information about Facebook users by using "an automated script” that caused error messages to be generated.

"These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages, and were detected as unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information belonging to Facebook," David Chiappetta, Facebook’s lawyer said in the complaint.

Facebook in its legal filing claimed that the alleged information harvesting effort caused it to incur costs of US$5,000 and that it intends to seek additional damages, saying its reputation had been "irreparably" harmed. In addition, the company has urged a jury trial and is seeking to bar the defendants from accessing its computer systems in the future.

Founded by Zuckerberg and his Harvard buddy, Dustin Moskovitz in February 2004, the Palo Alto, California based, Facebook is the Internet’s second-largest social network, with 51 million active users.

Facebook was originally popular on college campuses, but last September the site opened up registration to non-college students. Since then it evolved into a major social networking destination to rival MySpace.com. According to Facebook estimates, it receives an average of 54 billion page views per month, and the average visitor stick to the site for 20 minutes, making it the a prime target for advertisers.