OUR LONG NATIONAL WINKLEVOSS NIGHTMARE APPEARS TO BE OVER**
I’m sure it’s some kind of hidden meangirl urge on my part, but I felt overly pleased by the 9th Circuit’s slapdown of the Winklevoss twins’ attempt to get more money out of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, despite the fact that they’d already settled with FB for $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook stock, now worth $150 million.
As the Wall Street Journal reported:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed, saying the twins weren’t the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace.
“The courts might have obliged, had the Winklevosses not settled their dispute and signed a release of all claims against Facebook,” wrote Chief Judge Alex Kozinski in his opinion.
Exactly.
WSJ reporter Ashby Jones, who was possessed of the same meangirl attitude, was even driven to using schadenfreude as a verb when confronted by the Winklevoss ruling.
The reporting at the Awl, while brief, was the funniest.
(**NOTE: It is from The Awl’s Choire Sicha that I heisted the headline for my post.)
It reads:
The Ninth Circuit—our favorite circuit! Sorry, other circuits!—has ruled that the Winklevosseseses must abide by a settlement reached with Facebook regarding their founding of such, or lack thereof. The two fellows claimed the settlement was reached with fraudulent input from Facebook. This sets a very important legal precedent, in that we don’t have to hear about them any more.
Oh, yeah, and there’s also this guy, with his lawsuit.
LAPD OFFICERS WHO COMPLAINED ABOUT TRAFFIC TICKET QUOTAS WIN $2 MIL IN COURT
The LA Times’ Andrew Blankstein and Joel Rubin have the story:
A jury awarded a pair of Los Angeles police officers $2 million Monday after determining that LAPD supervisors had retaliated against the officers for complaining about alleged traffic ticket quotas.
Howard Chan and David Benioff, both veteran motorcycle officers with the department’s West Traffic Division, sued the department in 2009, alleging that they had been punished with bogus performance reviews, threats of reassignment and other forms of harassment after objecting to demands from commanding officers that they write a certain number of tickets each day, according to the suit.
Ticket quotas are illegal under state law, since they can pressure police to write spurious tickets to meet the goal. The line between setting a quota and pushing officers to increase their productivity is a delicate one for field supervisors, who are often under pressure themselves to generate more citations…
We always suspected as much.
Nice that the officers won.