Facebook Court Defeat May Presage a Fall

Facebook has been handed a defeat in its attempts to censor the independent Harvard alumni magazine 02138, which published confidential court documents relating to founder Mark Zuckerberg's earlier work for a rival site. That's a good thing, says Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal, for whom the attempted injunction was "essentially a legal temper tantrum."

Facebook moved to quash 02138's publication of the documents under the pretense that they included personal information about Zuckerberg—a crushing irony, Swisher points out, now that the social networking site is under fire for precisely the same privacy issues. The defeat in court constitutes "a major fumble" for a company that just got a $15 billion valuation, and may make some investors think twice. (More Facebook stories.)