Facebook Beats Winklevosses, Second Case Looms

Twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra have dropped their case against Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured below). The trio of litigants have decided to accept an offer made in 2008.

This will not help Zuckerberg sleep any better at night because there is an ongoing claim filed by businessman Paul Ceglia who claims 84 percent ownership of Facebook and is seeking monetary damages.

One Down, One To Go

Several days ago Ceglia, who claims he is owed the damages by Zuckerberg reneging on a deal they made when Facebook was being developed, successfully passed a polygraph (lie-detector) test which, he claims, proves the veracity of his claim.

He also says he has documentary proof but has yet to submit that for examination. Facebook’s lawyers dismiss the polygraph test as unreliable and claim that the documents are forgeries, adding: “Ceglia does not dispute that he has a track record of forging documents to rip people off.”

The settlement of the long-running case with the Winklevoss twins follows an unsuccessful attempt by them to overturn the 2008 settlement for $65 million (£41m), with $20 million in cash and the rest in stocks. They claimed that the stock was overvalued and wanted a reassessment.

This case was turned down by the courts and the twins were in the process of appealing the decision in the US Supreme Court.

The twins claimed that they invented the concept of Facebook while students at Harvard College as a project initially called HarvardConnection and later renamed ConnectU. Narendra was hired by them to write the code but he graduated quit to work for Google and his friend Victor Gao took over, later handing the work over to Zuckerberg to finish.

Around that time, Zuckerberg launched “The Facebook” which the twins and Narendra claim was heavily based on HarvardConnection.

No reason was given for the abandonment of the case, which was initiated in 2004, but the shares awarded has since boomed with the recent explosive growth of Facebook. The allotted stock is currently valued at around $150 million (£94m).