Man Claiming Half Ownership of Facebook Is Now a Fugitive

alphadogg writes Paul D. Ceglia, who was arrested in 2012 for defrauding Facebook on the claim that he owns half the company, is now a fugitive. Ceglia cut off his electronic monitoring bracelet some time around last Friday and left home in violation of the conditions of his bail, court papers said. Ceglia claimed in a 2010 lawsuit that he was entitled to half ownership of Facebook under a 2003 contract with Mark Zuckerberg, who had done programming work for Ceglia's StreetFax.com.

Comments

Poor Mr. Ceglia

[Anonymous Coward]

He should have known: There's far too much money on the table for justice to be allowed. Did he really think he was going to take billions of dollars of value away from the people who quite literally run the world?

Re:So did he write facebook or not?

[TWX]

I worked for a boss once that would attempt to claim anything and everything that an employee did that was in any way possibly related to the field that the business was in could be his property as a work-for-hire, even when his employees were hourly so there couldn't even be a claim that any work in the field of computers could be applicable to a salaried staff member.

I do not know the man in question, but I imagine that it is not impossible that his claim against Zuckerberg was something along this line. I don't say this out of any appreciation for Facebook either, for what it's worth.

Paul D. Ceglia

[Hey_Jude_Jesus]

is an idiot. BTW, I own half of Microsoft too and I have an email from 1976 from Bill Gates that said so. :rolleyes: Now Paul is going to spend a lot of time in prison instead of being treated like a first time offender by the US Attorney.

Re:So did he write facebook or not?

[tompaulco]

I wouldn't doubt that Zuckerberg did promise him some share in the company. This is a standard business practice. Executives will promise shares of the company to the developers, who then toil day and night in hopes of a payoff. The executives are very careful never to put this in writing, and every time you ask about it, they never can seem to get around to putting it in writing, but their word is golden. Then, when the company finally starts to make money, they conveniently forget about all of their promises. In fact, I recently got terminated from one such place because they finally started to make money and could no longer dance around the fact that they hadn't given me the shares in the company that they had been promising for the previous 9 years.