A contract at the heart of a lawsuit seeking half ownership of Facebook does not mention the social networking giant and has nothing to do with it, Facebook said in a court filing.

Paul Ceglia sued Facebook in July 2010, alleging that a contract he struck with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2003 entitled him to half the company.

Facebook, the world's No. 1 Internet social network with more than 500 million users, has previously said the contract Ceglia attached to his lawsuit was a fabrication and has characterized him as an "inveterate scam artist."

In a court filing on Monday, attorneys for Facebook said an authentic contract was found embedded in electronic data on Ceglia's computer but that document mentions only another company, StreetFax.

If the case is still allowed to continue despite the discovery, attorneys for Facebook said they will formally ask a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

An attorney for Ceglia did not immediately return a call for comment.

According to Ceglia's lawsuit, Zuckerberg told him if he hired Zuckerberg to work on Ceglia's StreetFax.com project and helped fund the development of another project that became Facebook, Zuckerberg would give Ceglia a one-half interest in the project that became Facebook. The case is Ceglia v. Zuckerberg et al, U.S. District Court, Western District of New York, No. 10-00569.

(Reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Gary Hill)

((dan.levine@thomsonreuters.com; +1 415 348-4726)) Keywords: FACEBOOK/LAWSUIT

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