Winklevosses AboutFacebooked!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on June 26, 2008 at 12:02 AM PT
Ah, the Winklevosses!
They lost.
In court, I mean, not in rowing!
But I am sad to say BoomTown is deeply uninterested in the long-running legal struggle between Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the hot social-networking site and the group affiliated with ConnectU–heretofore referred to by BoomTown as NotFacebook.
Namely the Winklevoss brothers, Cameron and Tyler (and also another guy, not a Winklevoss), who are world-class rowers.
Without going into the gory details, they settled a lawsuit in February that centered on how Facebook was founded and whether or not Zuckerberg stole code to create it while an undergrad at Harvard University.
And then the Winklevosses claimed that that settlement in the endless legal battle should be voided because of fraud and reopened.
The ConnectU side claimed that it had found some “smoking” gun instant messages that proved their case.
Whatever.
The federal judge in San Jose decided to let Facebook enforce the settlement anyway (but, because there are lawyers involved, there will probably be yet another bite at the apple).
In any case, BoomTown fully enjoyed the take-no-prisoners PR stylings of Facebook, now under uber-PR guru Elliot Schrage and, thus, we render the statement about the win here in its entirety:
We are happy that Judge Ware enforced the agreement settling our dispute with the ConnectU founders. ConnectU’s founders were represented by six lawyers and a professor at Wharton Business School when they signed the Settlement Agreement. The ConnectU founders understood the deal they made, and we are gratified that the Court rejected their false allegations of fraud. Their challenge was simply a case of ‘buyers remorse,’ as described by the Boston Court earlier this month.
We were disappointed that we had to litigate the settlement, as we believed we were caught in the middle of a fee dispute between ConnectU’s founders and its former counsel. Nevertheless, we can now consider this chapter closed and wish the Winklevoss brothers the best of luck in their future endeavors.”
As in, don’t let the door hit your Winklevii on your way out!
Comments
is there a statute of limitations on this kind of thing ? i came up with the idea for myspace in like 1994.
- srini
Posted by Srini Kumar at June 26th, 2008 at 12:56 ammetanotes.com
>>”wish the Winklevoss brothers the best of luck”
that’s a typo there at the end… i think they meant to spell one of those words with a leading ‘f’.
Posted by dave mcclure at June 26th, 2008 at 8:10 am