Mark Zuckerberg won a legal battle against former Harvard classmates who accuse him of stealing their idea for Facebook, but the feud made famous on the silver screen is not over yet.
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss must accept a cash and stock settlement with Facebook that had been valued at US$65 million, a US appeals court ruled on Monday. Meanwhile, a New York man filed an amended lawsuit against Zuckerberg on Monday, citing a 2003 e-mail in which Zuckerberg discusses an urgent need to launch his site before “a couple of upperclassmen” could launch theirs, an apparent reference to the Winklevoss twins.
The Winklevoss brothers argued their settlement with Facebook was unfair because the company hid information from them during talks. However, the twins were sophisticated negotiators aided by a team of lawyers, 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel.
“At some point, litigation must come to an end,” he wrote. “That point has now been reached.”
An attorney for the brothers, Jerome Falk Jr, said on Monday his clients would seek a rehearing before a larger, en banc group of 9th Circuit judges.
That larger group can overrule a three-judge panel, although only a fraction of cases undergo such a review. Should the 9th Circuit refuse to rehear the case, the last option would be an appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Falk said he “respectfully” disagreed with the 9th Circuit’s conclusions.
The 1.96m Winklevoss brothers are Olympic rowers who participated in the 2008 games in Beijing, and their saga with Zuckerberg was dramatized in the film The Social Network.
The twins, along with Divya Narendra, started a company called ConnectU while at Harvard. They say Zuckerberg stole their idea. Facebook denies these claims.
Facebook took in US$1.2 billion of revenue in the first nine months of last year, according to documents that Goldman Sachs provided to clients to entice investors in a special fund set up to invest in the giant social networking firm.
The company was valued at US$50 billion as part of that transaction. The company said on Monday it is evaluating the Internet market in China, but a source indicated it has not yet signed a business deal with any companies there.
The Winklevoss twins and Narendra agreed to a settlement that had been valued at US$65 million. However, they argue that, based on an internal valuation that Facebook did not reveal, they should have received more Facebook shares as part of the deal.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained