Winklevoss Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg Has Sent You a $65 Million Gift
by John Paczkowski
Posted on February 10, 2009 at 11:25 AM PT
Frankly, I’m kind of appalled that they’re threatening me after the work I’ve done for them free of charge, but after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections including companies like Microsoft, I can’t say I’m surprised. I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.”
The inane dispute over the provenance of Facebook apparently ended in a multimillion dollar resolution. Facebook has reportedly paid the founders of ConnectU $65 million to settle a lawsuit that accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of lifting the social network’s source code and business plan when he worked for it as a programmer. A nice little financial windfall for the founders of ConnectU–brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their colleague, Divya Narendra. Facebook certainly has money to pay to make the suit go away and a very good reason to pay it: It would be poor form to leave its quaint little creation myth in dispute.
News of the “confidential agreement” was apparently broken by ConnectU’s legal counsel, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, which inadvertently disclosed it in a promotion for its legal services.
“Lawyers in the heavyweight fight had expended great effort to keep the settlement secret–even going as far as persuading a judge to clear the courtroom of reporters on one occasion,” The Recorder reports. “But ConnectU’s former lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges published the settlement amount in a firm advertisement trumpeting the firm’s prowess. ‘WON $65 million settlement against Facebook’ appears, along with dozens of other Quinn outcomes from last year, in the firm’s January business litigation newsletter.”
All parties involved declined comment on the “confidential settlement.”
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Comments
i think zuckerberg ripped off the idea and made a clone of it
they could have asked for 100% of facebook
Posted by Sam Harrison at February 10th, 2009 at 12:23 pm