More Legal Drama for Zuckerberg
ā¢
Just when we thought Zuckerberg was done for good with Winklevi drama and all other legal matters, Paul D. Ceglia of Wellsville, NY filed a lawsuit against Facebook claiming partial ownership of the company.
The name Ceglia might ring a bell. Last July, Ceglia sued Zuckerberg for "monetary damages and 84 percent ownership of Facebook, Inc.," according to the civil suit document. As evidence for the claim, a "Work For Hire"Ā contract was put forth in which Ceglia allege that Zuckerberg had sold Ceglia 50 percent of a project cited in the document as "The Face Book" for $1,000. At the time, Zuckerberg is purported to have helped code Ceglia's project "StreetFax.com." Facebook dismissed the civil suit as a scam and the contract as a forgery.
Ceglia's record is all but clean. In 1997, he pleaded guilty to possession of 400 grams of psilocybin (or hallucinogenic mushrooms). Later, in 2010 Ceglia was sued by New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo for running a fraudulent wood-pellet fuel distribution company in Wellsville, NY and defrauding customers of over $200,000. The case was settled in October 2010.
Now Ceglia is back with a Winklevossian persistence. He re-filed an amended 25-page lawsuit and has produced leaked emails from an alleged correspondence with Zuckerberg from seven years ago.
While the legitimacy of the emails is still under debate, the alleged correspondence sheds interesting light on the continuing metamorphosis of Zuckerberg's public image. In some portions of the correspondence Ceglia attacks Zuckerberg's purported sense of Harvard entitlement.
"I'm starting to think you just blew that money Mark. You know perfectly well that you can't just take a persons [sic] investment and then spend it on women and beer or whatever you do up there in Harvard. I've been stalled long enough on this thing and if I don't see something soon I'll have no choice but to contact the school and perhaps your parentsĀ in Dobbs Ferry and let them know whats [sic] been going on," Ceglia purportedly wrote in an email.
With all this in mind, the screenshot of Ceglia's Facebook page is doubly ironic. Under "Philosophy," Ceglia quotes Gandhi's famous quote "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
If all this seems complicated, check out this simplified YouTube summary of the entire debacle.