Was Facebook a stolen idea? PART 1.

THE STORY OF ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL SITES.

Was Facebook, which is one of the silos controlling much of the data that flows through the internet today, a venture by Mark Zuckerberg and others, a stolen idea?

The Winklevoss brothers popularly known as ‘The Bitcoin Billionaires’ today, sued Zuckerberg for what they call ‘an infringement of their intellectual property rights.’(A dating venture which they claim gave Mark the idea of Facebook in the first place). But were the allegations against the wonder boy who is the youngest cent billionaire today, true?

It was a little past three on a Friday afternoon and Tyler Winklevoss along with his brother Cameron Winklevoss were seated in a room gazing at similar office buildings piercing the midday fog, waiting for the other party to show up. Whilst the brothers were finding similar grounds to settle, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t willing to sit in the same room with them. Taken the senior jocks these brothers were, Zuckerberg’s lawyer informed them that he had some security concerns and that only one of them should mark their presence in that room. Tyler decided that Cameron should be the one because he was less of an alpha and had the ability to keep his cool throughout the mediation.

During the talk Cameron accused him and said, “We approached you with our idea. We gave you unfettered access to our entire code base and we saw that light bulb turn on inside your head.”

“You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for us.”                                                                                            

To which Mark replied,” I am here because you are suing me. You weren’t the first person in the world to have an idea for a social network & neither am I. Friendster and MySpace existed before facebook and the last I checked, Tom from MySpace isn’t suing me.”

Let’s let the camera roll back to the fall of 2003, the campuses of Harvard, where all of this started in the first place.

Divya Narendra, along with the Winklevoss twins (Cameron and Tyler), were in their dorm room, computing the execution of their plan. The plan was a dating venture designed exclusively for the alumni of Harvard, originally Narendra’s idea. The site was to be called ‘Harvard Connections’ (Recognized today as ConnectU). The front-end pages, registration system, database, back-end coding & the way the users could connect (They called it ‘The Handshake’), was ready. Sanjay Mavinkurve who helped them until now, had ditched them for a job he had gotten at Google. Now all they were in a lookout for was somebody who would write a program for their site.

On the other hand, for a sophomore who hadn’t gotten into Harvard because he was a prodigy, Mark Zuckerberg was in the limelight because of a ‘Hot or Not’ clone he had designed for Harvard. ‘Facemash’ as it was known then, was a site that Zuckerberg created.The way this site worked was it pulled out photos by breaking into the Harvard sites and it was wrong enough to get Zuckerberg expelled.

On November 19th, 2003 an article in The Harvard Crimson read that Mark Zuckerberg was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights and individual privacy. But lucky for him, weeks after this, an article from the same Harvard Crimson read about how Facemash was an instant hit. Mark Zuckerberg was the new chat in town. Now for a socially awkward guy like himself, this article did wonders to Zuckerberg in terms of popularity.

This was what convinced the twin brothers and Narendra that Zuckerberg was fit for their job.

Their first meeting was set up in Harvard’s Kirkland house. On being acquainted with the details of the job to be done,“ Mark seemed enthusiastic and excited about Harvard Connection” as mentioned by the Winklevoss brothers.

To their surprise, Mark Zuckerberg suggested them that he be compensated in the form of sweat equity instead of a payment for his service. He was made partner. They had an oral agreement as claimed by the Winklevoss brothers.

During the first two weeks of their venture, the brothers claimed that Mark was very much in the awe of the idea and worked consistently to get it done. Unlike the other fortnight, Mark was now avoiding their mails. The brothers claimed that he would dodge their work for what Zuckerberg mentioned to be ‘school projects’.

Flabbergasted, the brothers and Divya Narendra decided to pay Mark Zuckerberg a visit. On having reached his dorm room, Narendra spotted a white board with multiple pins of code under the heading ‘Harvard Connection’. As he stood up to take a closer look of it, Zuckerberg allegedly stopped him from intervening his private space.

From November to January, there was an unforeseeable change of attitude in Zuckerberg’s behavior.

“Sorry it's taken a while for me to get back to you. I'm completely swamped with work this week. I"m still a little skeptical that we have enough functionality in the site to really draw the attention and gain the critical mass necessary to get a site like this to run…Anyhow, we'll talk about it once I get everything else done.” - One of his January mails read.

For the same guy who was awestruck with the idea of this venture was now skeptical about its functionality?

On January 8th2004, Zuckerberg emailed Narendra which read that he had made some changes in the program and those seemed to be working great. He further mentioned that he would meet them on the 13th of that month and discuss the rest.

The next they know, on 11th January Mark Zuckerberg registered the domain name facebook.com which eventually became Facebook.

Divya Narendra and Winklevoss brothers slapped Mark Zuckerberg with a lawsuit which accused him of ‘Illegally using the source code intended for the website he was hired to create.’

In 2007, Massachusetts Judge Douglas P. Woodlock called their allegations "tissue thin." Referring to the agreement that Mark had allegedly breached, Woodlock also wrote, "Dorm room chit-chat does not make a contract." A year later, the end finally seemed in sight: a judge ruled against Facebook's move to dismiss the case. Shortly thereafter, the parties agreed to settle.

An out of court settlement of $65 million along with making Divya Narendra part owner was what it took to bring an end to this.

Even if deep down the Facebook C.E.O. didn’t think the Winklevoss’ claims had merit, they had always assumed that he knew they had enough evidence—the atmos­pherics alone were plenty—and then there were the e-mails. There were a lot of e-mails, and the twins thought they were damaging enough to tie Zuckerberg up in knots and turn him into a human pretzel on the stand. A public trial had to be too risky to consider. Fraud was not something to leave to 12 jurors to decide. Worse yet, Zuckerberg knew that the other side was pushing to see the messages revealed through forensic discovery—electronic imaging—of his computer’s hard drive, the same computer he’d used back at Harvard. As the twins would later find out, Zuckerberg had good reason not to want to let that happen.