Comment by ary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ary | Hacker News Reader

Since pointing fingers at the Winklevoss twins is a common theme in these threads I'll just post at the top.

Regardless of who's side you're on in this you have to accept that the value of what's contested (who came up with / owns / started Facebook) is worth much, much more than ~$65 million (the original settlement amount). Call it greed or call it white-collar entitlement, but these guys seem serious about seeing it all the way through. Who wouldn't? No sane lawyer is going to advise them to settle for a fraction of what they might actually have a legal right to. Too much money is on the table.

The crux of the argument (for me personally) is whether or not these guys hired Zuckerberg to build the original version of what became Facebook. I've not read up enough to be convinced either way, but again, lawyers will weigh the options and advise accordingly. At the end of it there will at least be some more case law around who-owns-what under similar circumstances.

"Regardless of who's side you're on in this you have to accept that the value of what's contested (who came up with / owns / started Facebook) is worth much, much more than ~$65 million (the original settlement amount). "

If you mean the value of Facebook, of course it's worth more. But nobody would give them the entire value of Facebook, not even close. They settled because, apparently, their lawyers thought it was the best deal they were going to get. Otherwise why settle in the first place?

They're not trying to get the settlement undone because they didn't like the settlement itself. They're just claiming that Facebook lied about how much money exactly they were getting as part of the settlement.

"No sane lawyer is going to advise them to settle for a fraction of what they might actually have a legal right to. Too much money is on the table."

Well first of all they did settle, originally. And by the way, they refused to pay their first lawyers (who did the settling) for 2 years. Recently, a judge ordered them to pay their lawyers.

"The crux of the argument (for me personally) is whether or not these guys hired Zuckerberg to build the original version of what became Facebook."

They did hire Zuckerberg to build their site. This is not contested. I'm pretty sure it's also uncontested that Zuckerberg didn't copy any of their code or anything. How similar the two ideas are is something that's pretty hard to say, though.

First off, I never said the entire value, but meant to point out that their potential stake could be worth far more than $65 million. According to the linked article they're claiming Facebook lied about its value at the time of the settlement, and they they're entitled to an amount promised based on its true valuation.

Your point about what they hired him to do is closer to what I was getting at, but I suppose that point seems clear enough given that they came to a settlement.

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