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Facebook Wants Ownership Case Thrown Out
crimeandpunishment writes "Attorneys for Facebook and a New York man claiming majority ownership of the site faced off in a Buffalo courtroom Tuesday, and if Facebook gets its way there won't be too many more days in court. The site wants to get Paul Ceglia's claim thrown out of court. He claims a seven-year-old agreement with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg entitles him to 84 percent of the company. Facebook acknowledges Ceglia and Zuckerberg worked together, but says the contract Ceglia submitted was full of 'things that don't make sense.'"
well maybe not now, when it's "worth" so much, but back then when he was just a thieving punk kid with no money the relationship was beneficial to him. Contracts don't need to be written by lawyers to be legally binding.
Don't make sense, as in, someone putting up capital being entitled to a slice of the pie? Hmm.
I predict they are screwed.
Note how they are not denying the existence of the agreement or the authenticity of the signatures on that agreement.
What makes sense and what is legally binding are two different things.
In all my years of Microsoft hating, Oracle hating, IBM hating, closed-source hating, I have never wanted a company to fail so much as Facebook. It is quite surreal to me, a visceral, deep-set dislike of the company and everything it stands for. It is reflexive, not even intellectual. I just can't stand them.
I thought Microsoft would be the worst, because I went through years when they were truly evil, but even at that time I never really hated Bill Gates. He's still kind of a geek, and he did work hard, even if he had an over-burdened competitive streak. And Ballmer, while he is a gorilla, he is just a gorilla. He does plenty of things that are entertaining.
But Zuckerberg is just a douche. He is like the lowest of the low, he stole the idea for the company, he doesn't care about his customers, he doesn't care about his partners, he got lucky, and he has absolutely no redeeming qualities. If Bill Gates hadn't gotten lucky working with IBM, he would have started another company and been successful, although maybe not to the same degree. That's just what kind of person he is. Mark Zuckerberg is the kind of guy who takes everything that is bad about investment bankers and brings it into the programming world. He should go back to banking where he belongs. There are lots of douches there. He would fit right in.
Qxe4
Steady decline in user satisfaction......and steady increase in userbase size and advertising revenue. People may not be satisfied with Facebook, but they will still use it. And I say that in all sadness, wishing they wouldn't.
Qxe4
Mark, come on man - give the man his due - it's only 84% of the stuff you ripped others off for...
In the meantime, Google is putting together a Facebook killer. And the killer feature will be that your Mafia Wars and Farmville accounts will transfer over to this new social network, Google Me.
Umm, you do know who they're working with right? Zynga, the other Facebook company that doesn't care about users.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It's a contract dispute between two individuals. The outcome will depend on the facts of the case and the judge's interpretation of the contract. No rights involved, except for the plaintiff's exercise of his right to sue.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That's actually not even approximately true. If the terms of a written document purporting to be a contract literally don't make sense (i.e., have a clear meaning), then the agreement may quite well fail to be a contract. The absence of sufficiently clear obligations for either party could, for instance, make the agreement fail to be a contract for lack of mutual consideration. Not making sense could also cause a contract to fail for evidence of an actual agreement on the essential terms of the exchange.
People keep asking that, but what I want to know is - is there a particular reason why he should have?
People keep mentioning the statute of limitations. IANAL, but wouldn't they start when Zuckerberg tried to make the sale, not when they made the contract (not that your post states that)? It's not like contracts have an expiry date themselves, do they?