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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."

8 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Dear Winklevii by JamesP · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational lawyer station

    No Love

    Emperor Zuckerberg

    No, really, I'm expecting something like this. They got away with 65million already.
    It's a failure of settlement they were allowed to sue again and keep the settlement

    Now really I'm rooting for Mark to wipe the floor with them.

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    1. Re:Dear Winklevii by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "got away with"? Zuckerberg got away with his crime for a pittance of a payment in stock, and he allegedly accomplished this on the back of another crime. Rooting for Mark is like rooting for Darth Vader because some Rebel made a bad pun.

      --
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    2. Re:Dear Winklevii by JamesP · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If the WV had been capable of doing Facebook they would have done facebook!

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    3. Re:Dear Winklevii by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Teacher, teacher! That big meanie head stole my idea!"

      Ideas are a dime a dozen. To get actual value requires--gasp--actual work. Get over it, move on, and learn how to implement your own ideas instead of being useless business majors.

    4. Re:Dear Winklevii by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's a battle between 2 millionaire douchebags from a privileged background, I'm amazed people would root for one over the other. Screw all of them.

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      If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
    5. Re:Dear Winklevii by GFLPraxis · · Score: 3

      Do you know what a settlement is?

    6. Re:Dear Winklevii by DarkOx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In general I am inclined to agree but its not so simple in this case. They have always claimed that they were partners and had invested in Zuckerburg money for the start up. If that's true they are entitled to a share. That is the whole concept of venture cap.

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  2. Re:How did he steal it? by myowntrueself · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.