The Winklevoss twins are suing Facebook again. If you saw the film, "The Social Network," you'll remember the very tall and athletic Harvard rowers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, referred to as "The Winklevii" by the fictional Mark Zuckerberg. The identical twins, maintaining that Zuckerberg stole their ideas for Facebook from their own social networking site called Harvard Connection, filed a lawsuit. That's the real world way to "unfriend" someone. Now they are suing again because they dispute the valuation used for the settlement they received and according to PCWorld, they are even accusing Mark Zuckerberg of securities fraud.
The Winklevoss Twins received a $65 million settlement from the first lawsuit. Zuckerberg is worth about $6.9 billion so that settlement didn't break the bank. Zuckerberg has recently added his name to Bill Gates'Â "Giving Pledge" and if the Facebook billionaire would indeed give away half of his wealth as promised in the non-binding pledge, that would still leave $3.9 billion or so for the Winklevoss brothers to try and get their hands on. It all seems very unsociable.
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Comments: 20
Tech history is full of plagiarism. Facebook is more a case of something being there at the right time than real innovation. Friendster and MySpace preceded Facebook. Social networking goes back to the dawn of the Internet to things like mailing lists, USENET, and IRC.
Usenet? Careful, you're showing your age :-)
I subscribe to a few mailing lists dedicated to special interest stuff and have since the middle '90s. I used BBSs before I got an Internet connection.
It's weird. I'm very old in PC years although not ancient. Got my first PC, an Atari ST, around 1986. Went to the dark side with a DOS based clone in 1990. I wanted an Altair when they first came out but couldn't afford one.
They already won $65,000,000. If the means by which Zuckerberg ended up with the golden goose was at all impressively ugly ... not only might they get more, but Zuckerberg could end up more seriously damaged than just financially.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40593836/ns/business-us_business/
I pity those judges & juries who get roped into having to slog through cases like this. Whew!