More Facebook Court Cases
April 12th, 2011 | by Jen |Emails allegedly written by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg are cited in a new court filing by Paul Ceglia as proof of his claim that he’s entitled to 50 per cent of the company under a 2003 contract.
The revised complaint, filed yesterday in federal court in Buffalo, New York, includes new allegations supporting Ceglia’s claim to own part of Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, the world’s biggest social-networking site, including that Zuckerberg sent numerous emails discussing the terms of the contract and the early development of “The Face Book” with Ceglia.
“They’re exactly what you would expect between two people trying to develop a website,” said Robert Brownlie, a lawyer for Ceglia, referring to the emails in a telephone interview.
Ceglia alleges that Zuckerberg defrauded him, lying about the early success of “The Face Book” at Harvard University, where Zuckerberg was a student at the time. Ceglia claims he is entitled to half of Facebook, a closely held company worth as much as $US55 billion, according to Sharespost.com, an online marketplace for investment in companies that aren’t publicly traded.
On the same day that Ceglia revised his complaint, a federal appeals court upheld the settlement of a years-long legal dispute dramatised in the Academy Award-winning 2010 film The Social Network that pitted Zuckerberg against former classmates from Harvard who accused him of stealing the idea for Facebook.