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FaceBook Will Be Forced to Shut Down
By newsguy | September 28, 2007
Attention Mark Zuckerberg (sp?) You are now broke.
According to a Reuters article, a U.S. judge gave a group of your old Harvard pals 2 weeks to back up claims that you stole your ideas and now you owe them.
According to Reuters, the battle is a classic try-to-jump-on-board-after-all-the-hard-work is done case:
“It’s a story that could only come out of the Ivy League: the twins, Olympic hopefuls, against the tech entrepreneur superstar,” quipped Justin Smith, blogger at Inside Facebook. “I think that people are just really attracted to the story of Mark Zuckerberg and how much the company has grown, and how Facebook has been woven into the culture of not only college students but beyond.”
The dispute is several years in the making, having originated in the spring of 2004 on behalf of the founders of ConnectU — Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The three Harvard seniors had originally conceived of the site, originally known as HarvardConnection.com, in 2002.
According to court documents, the claimants had casually recruited fellow Harvard student Zuckerberg, then a fresher, to their fledgling enterprise in late 2003 after hearing about his Web development skills. Then, if the narrative of the complaint is to be believed, Zuckerberg stalled his work on ConnectU while simultaneously working on his own, similar project.
Claiming that Zuckerberg had stolen their business plan and structure, the ConnectU founders petitioned to Harvard’s administration late in their final year, claiming that it was an honour code violation. They were promptly slighted, as Smith and other longtime Facebook followers point out, because the school claimed that its honour code did not have jurisdiction over a matter that was not academic in nature. Then, that September, ConnectU took the case to court.
And here we are. Several years later. The rich spoiled Ivy twins want their money Mark.
Of course you could just buy 14-15 of the nation’s best law firms and tie it up in court for the next 23 years as you cruise around in your Tiger Woods yacht. Not really worry about it - that would be one direction to take. I mean, what if their lawyers write you letters?
You don’t want that.
But that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. Come on Mark, you should throw them some cash for all their hard work. Afterall, we all know making a company worth billions of dollars is just as hard as having an idea about a billion dollar business.
Maybe you could get them on the cover of a few magazines and list them on the website.
Throw me a few hundred g’s while your at it. Afterall, I thought having a huge network of people talking back and forth each day generating millions and millions of free pageviews would be a good idea too. I thought that in 1999, so maybe I have a case against you, and a few others at the same time.
Don’t fret though, you have 450,000 people on Facebook who support you.
Don’t shut down, at least just not yet.
Topics: Old School News |
September 30th, 2007 at 4:54 am
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article ook Will Be Forced to Shut Down | News Train, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Is this just a rumor?
July 9th, 2008 at 1:37 am
I don’t think it can be shut down… I mean how can you shut down the FBI number one spy system.. lol!