While the press were salivating over story-of-the -summer Facebook and the gee-whiz news that its founder Mark Zuckerberg was being sued for allegedly stealing the whole idea from some college acquaintances, it went un-noticed that Facebook is itself suing - that's right, those same college acquaintances.

ConnectU was a startup social networking site whose founders say they employed Zuckerberg. Their suit claims he took their ideas and built Facebook out of them.

But in the background lies another suit, in which Facebook accuses ConnectU of hiring programmers to break into its system, read address books and send ConnectU marketing material to Facebook members' friends, apparently on behalf of those members.

The system was designed, says Facebook, to work with other sites as well as its own, but it said that some elements of it were specifically designed to evade detection by Facebook.

The case stumbled on a dispute over jurisdiction, but Judge Richard Seeborg, who will also oversee the high-profile case between Zuckerberg and ConnectU, said that the Californian court's reach could extend to some Washington-based defendants.

That ruling in itself could set a vital precedent for ecommerce cases.

Seeborg said that jurisdiction can be asserted over people who take action against a person or company even if they don't know that person's physical location.

That is a law change that could have wide ramifications, but in this dispute most people's eyes will be on just how heated and vicious the series of cases between ConnectU and trend-of-the-hour Facebook will get.