Just when it looked as if the commotion over Facebook’s early days might be about to disappear, the long-running legal shenanigans over the rightful ownership of the online social network has sprung another surprise. Paul Ceglia has submitted a complaint with e-mails that he claimed would support his case for a share in the company.

Mr Ceglia’s surprise was dropped on the same day that Facebook’s boss had received some better news – the Winklevi case was finally over.

According to lawyer Scott Dettmer, a long-time Silicon Valley lawyer:

This is the kind of thing that start-up lawyers worry about all the time. In the early days of forming a company, people tend to be fairly informal.

We usually ask entrepreneurs to think about all the discussions that they’ve had. Sometimes there is a little cleaning up to do. If you don’t clean it up then, it generally doesn’t age well.

Mr Ceglia, a wood-pellet salesman from upstate New York, has previously pleaded guilty to possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Texas in 1977 and was last year arrested and charged with fraud, resulting in his business being shut down.

The new suit includes excerpts from e-mails purportedly exchanged between Ceglia and Zuckerberg and, if authentic, could become a major nuisance for Facebook.

Ceglia’s original claim laid last year was for an 84% stake in Facebook but this has now been revised to 50% in the new suit.

A claim purportedly made by Zuckerberg in one of the emails suggests Zuckerberg might be seeing a sequel to The Social Network:

I’d like to suggest that you drop the penalty completely and that we officially return to 50/50 ownership.

Of course there are the sceptics too. They are dutifully dismissing the claims made by Ceglia until the original emails surface.

And rightfully so. The man has some impressive fraud charges even if he did assist Zuckerberg with start-up funding.

One of Ceglia’s lawyers, Robert Brownlie, is having the last laugh at the moment though:

Anyone who claims this case is fraudulent and brought by a scam artist will come to regret those claims.

Interesting.

[Source: NYTimes]