Winklevoss Twins To Continue Fighting Facebook

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook's longest legal saga, which has lasted seven years so far, looked like it was finally closed, but that was just a false alarm. In a filing earlier this week with the federal court in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, who accuse him of stealing their idea for the social network, decided not to seek US Supreme Court review of the $65 million settlement made in 2008. Everyone thought this meant they had finally given up. It turns out that the twins have decided to keep fighting after all, just with a different lawsuit."

Comments

Re:How did he steal it?

[myowntrueself]

Seriously how did he steal their idea? When they came up with it, they couldn't have gotten it off the ground then? Did he beat them in building the site first? They couldn't have created their idea still? This seems frivolous to me. It's not like he stole their idea for a physical object and then patented the idea so they could never make it.

They had an idea for a site. He made them think that he was working on that site for them. Meanwhile he was working on a similar site for himself, a site which would have been competing with the site he was supposed to be building for them. He stalled them and effectively strangled their project from the inside.

Its a fairly obvious scam when you think about it, a kind of 'denial of service'.

What he should have done is tell them "no, I'm not going to be working for you, you will have to hire someone else." Had he done this and had they hired someone else its possible that their site would have launched ahead of his and he would have faced real competition.

Maybe he wouldn't be the billionaire he is today had he not pulled off this scam.