[JURIST] A judge in the US District Court for the Northern District of California [official website] Wednesday granted a motion [order, PDF] to enforce a previous settlement agreement between two social networking websites, Facebook [corporate backgrounder] and ConnectU [corporate website]. The ruling effectively ends the two companies' ongoing legal battle [case materials] concerning ownership of source code forming the basis of Facebook. The two sides had agreed on a settlement in February, but ConnectU had sought to annul that agreement [Bloomberg report], arguing that Facebook had committed fraud in the procurement, material terms were missing, and the agreement did not reflect the parties' intentions. Judge James Ware rejected ConnectU's arguments asserting unclear terms and fraud:

In sum, the Court finds that the Agreement reached by the parties does not display on its face a failure to agree or any uncertainty regarding its material terms. Accordingly, the Court finds that the Agreement is enforceable...[T]he Court finds that Defendants have failed to tender sufficient evidence of fraud in the circumstances proffered to the Court to create a genuine dispute as to whether the Agreement was fraudulently induced.