Facebook In Court

ScaredOfTheMan writes "'The lawsuit, filed by brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accuses Zuckerberg, Facebook's 23-year-old C.E.O, of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he briefly worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer for their own fledgling social-networking site, now known as ConnectU. The plaintiffs have demanded that Facebook be shut down and that full control of the site — and its profits — be turned over to them.' I just wonder why they waited so long to sue? If he really stole their idea in 2003, why wait four years?"

Why wait

[wmelnick]

Until it became massively profitable, why sue? The idea of a lawsuit is to get damages. As long as you do not pass the statute of limitations, waiting is not counted against you.

let them do all the hard work

[Alien54]

of becoming a roaring success.

Then you come in and steal the fruits of their labors. Because the way they developed it and did it is not the way you would have done it.

and their way worked.

Re:Why wait

[Anonymous Coward]

And could the editors please start excising biased submitter comments from the article summary?

It's going to court, the submitter is not the judge or jury, and the comment space is the proper venue for opinions - not the summary.

Re:let them do all the hard work

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Or, the guy stole their source code and profited off it, and now they want a cut for their hard work. It really all depends which angle you look at it.

Re:of course, sue now

[ghostlibrary]

> This case has teeth.

Hmm... IANAL, but the Crimson article is replent with indication that Zuckerberg was not part of their business-- "he never asked for compensation", "we would have been happy to pay for his services.", "his was not a paid position".

A contract is an offer plus an acceptance plus renumeration. Without renumeration, there's not as many teeth as one might think.

Key is "neither camp went so far as to label the partnership contractually binding." This could be in the same category as non-competes, i.e. can you limit what someone does in the future just because they worked with you in the past. And without compensation, the 'work' part is kinda iffy, more like 'talked with' or 'stopped by'.

This is where ethics (did Zuckerberg screw them over) divides with business (did Zuckerberg do something illegal). Law is murky there. Answer hazy, check again later.

Shutdown face book?

[Broken scope]

Do they have a deathwish? Socially active college students everywhere won't be able to function without facebook! How will they nkow who is dating who? Where will the post photographic proof of the latest stupid shit they did? Where else will the put their whiny I hate the opposite sex notes. Certainly not myspace.. for there is an evil there that does not sleep.

You would have an agrngy horde on your hands very quickly.

Editors, please edit!

[WIAKywbfatw]

OK, I realise that people aren't being paid to submit their stories but surely the editors are being paid to edit them?

Shouldn't they at least be reading the submissions (titles and story) and then any linked articles as well to make sure that they've been accurately summarised (not to mention relevant)?

It seems the Firehose is catching most dupes (we get the occasional one but not 2-4 a day as we did a couple of years back) but typos, innacurate headlines, poorly worded summaries and even innacurate stories (such as this one) still abound.

Just looking at the current frontpage, I can see several stories that either have titles or summaries that need editing:

Facebook in Court [slashdot.org] : the summary, which fails to tell us that the legal fight has been going on for years, and implies that it's only been started now because of greed.

Gadgets Have Taken Over For Our Brains [slashdot.org] : the summary, which references Trinity College, but not which Trinity College. Is it the one in London, Cambridge, Washington DC, Toronto, Carmarthen, Florida, Melbourne...? No, it's the one in Dublin? So tell us.

Linux Creator Calls GPLv3 Authors 'Hypocrites' [slashdot.org] : Ridiculous story that takes quotes out of context to sensationalise the issue.

Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6 - A Mother Of A Motherboard [slashdot.org] : At last! A motherboard with three full-length PCI Express x16 slots! Except it only has two.

CEO Questionably Used Pseudonym to Post Online [slashdot.org] : An ambiguous if not misleading headline. Read the comments for more, but one thing that's not in question is that he used a pseudonym.

One Laptop Per Child and Intel Join Forces [slashdot.org] : Another ambiguous title, which seems to imply a joint venture. As Intel has joined the OLPC project it would have been more accurate for the title to simply say "Intel joins OLPC Project".

Call me a pedant if you want to but there are editors for a reason, so they should edit. Their job isn't that hard, and now they even have people looking at the Firehose helping them out, so why are we still getting so many poor or poorly-presented stories?

Re:of course, sue now

[ScrewMaster]

I haven't read the article, and I don't plan to and I have no particular interest in Facebook ... but this smacks of sour grapes. Okay ... he took their idea. So what? Ideas are cheap, one in a hundred thousand ever becomes anything worthwhile, and if you have a good idea and you give it away you're an idiot. You're especially stupid if you give it to someone who is better at execution than you are and don't have a formal agreement (granted, contracts are only as good as the people who sign them, but without one you're gonna have a much harder time in court.)

Now, if the guy stole their source code, that would be different. It still wouldn't be a matter "turning over the company" but it might be worth some damages. Odds are any code he ripped off isn't in service anymore anyway.

I've been through a few small business ventures (none of them made me millions, alas) and if there's one thing you learn early on it's a. find people that you trust and b. keep your trap shut. The worst enemy of a fledgling business is anyone or anything who will take what's been developed and clone it for their own profit. Secrecy is your best weapon, and until your product or service is launched and everyone knows about it, the most important secret is the central product idea itself.

Re:Editors, please edit!

[Lemmy Caution]

Well, there is no real economic incentive for the editors to do otherwise. Slashdot is unimaginably successful. No one has voted with their feet.

It's just sad that they take such little care and pride in their own project.

Re:Editors, please edit!

[TheRaven64]

I suspect that's because most people come here for the discussion, rather than the articles. Slashdot only posts around 10 articles a day, out of hundreds of possible stories. Many of these are so late that they are no longer topical. After a while, I started regarding the article as just a general topic; something akin to the subject in a chat room, which may be followed or ignored. Many of the most interesting threads here are wildly off-topic.

In short: We don't care about TFA, why should the editors?

Re:The american dream

[john82]

The other points of the greater argument notwithstanding, there is a significant difference between copying (stealing) a business plan and successfully realizing that plan. Further, it is highly unlikely that the code of Facebook today is identical and unimproved over a source base allegedly stolen some four years ago. In short while the origin of this service is in doubt, those behind Facebook made it work.

same simple idea, not business

[ToKsUri]

Facebook core is simple and basic. A lot of people have had similar ideas, and the early version of facebook (no more than a year ago) was something that anyone with medium level of php+mysql+html would have thought to themselves "I could do that and better in a few days!".

But thats not the merit. The difficult thing is turning that simple idea and design into something useful and into a profitable business. When I first heard of facebook i just thought it was one more of those pages i dont want to know about, but it somehow hooked. Looking at the connectu web page makes me wonder if they really have any user base. The page is simply ugly and difficult.

The difficulty of most businesses is not just having a good idea. It is knowing how to turn a good idea into a good business. Even if Zuckerberg really was influenced by the others, it was him who turned it into a success. Putting it in another way, if facebook would have never existed, connectU would not be the success facebook is now.