The best analysis of the lawsuit I've seen comes from grellas' brilliant posts here on HN[1]:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537158" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537158</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510528" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1510528</a><p>[1]Which, as a side note, drives home just how much better HN is than most other places on the internet, we got lengthy analyses, almost everywhere else was overrun with re-phrasings of "Oh boy Zuckerberg's fucked now!".
I find "remember you <class> 101 course" pretty pointless. Nearly every class I ever took began with simple stuff and then the following years you learnt why that was all wrong, not quite the truth, or how you work around those rules :-)
An intelligent attempt to encourage amateurs to avoid speculating about things they know nothing about. As with anything vaguely complex or esoteric, the media talking heads are pretending that they can break down a complicated issue (like contract law) into 30 second talking points and thus end up oversimplifying and misleading the general public.<p>Fortunately, this sort of issue (esoteric, complex and intractable to 30 second analysis by 24-hour news networks) tends to fade quickly from the headlines, so with any luck, we won't have to endure the idiotic platitudes of news anchors and their paid analysts for much longer.
This provides no new insight or any real insight at all. Of course we don't know what the clarity of the contract is yet. No one is claiming it's clear either. That's the purpose of the courts and a judge.
The point the "The Face Book" might not refer to the initial implementation of what we now know as "Facebook" is a good point, and I'm sure Facebook's lawyers will beat it to death.<p>The idea that not registering the domain name is some kind of proof that you aren't working on something sounds absurd coming from an obviously intelligent person. Maybe you could find a judge that is so technically unsophisticated to let that one fly, but the opposition won't.<p>I agree with the commenters that way that Paul Ceglia just wants his money. If he waited this long to attempt to grab a piece of Facebook, it seems unlikely he'd turn down a large settlement in return for a chance to fight Facebook's lawyers for the company.
I really don't understand the argument here. "It was a year before he registered the domain so he probably hadn't thought of it"? Well... except we have a contract that mentions it.
I believe the site we now know as facebook was, as recently as a couple years ago, referred to by its then primary user base, college students, as 'The Face Book'.
I hope the guy wins. This would be the most awesome justice I can think of in my lifetime. Well, if only the plantiff actually deserved to win... but the defendant, I'm confident he deserves to lose.