Court ruling might finally let Winklevoss twins enjoy their Facebook settlement in peace

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today tossed a lawsuit - first filed more than ten years ago - by an Amherst software developer who claimed Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss owed him half the $65 million settlement they won in their own famous legal wranglings with former Harvard classmate Mark Zuckerberg and his The Facebook, Inc.

In its ruling, the court determined that Wayne Chang and the Winklevii had already dissolved whatever formal ties they had before Facebook decided to talk settlement with the twins - and their father and a partner - and so is owned absolutely nothing. The ruling upholds a similar dismissal by a Superior Court judge

Chang, at the time a UMass Amherst student, had developed a file-sharing network that promised extra-speedy downloads because it relied on an experimental - and faster - possible alternative to the boring old Internet in use in 2004. The Winklevoss twins agreed to hire him to connect that system to the ConnectU social network they were building as an alternative to Facebook.

At issue through a decade of litigation was whether the twins had given Chang half ownership of their network through a holding company in exchange for his work to integrate his network with theirs, which would entitle him to a nice piece of the Facebook settlement.

The appeals court, after poring through instant and e-mail messages, concluded that after a falling out, Chang and the twins had effectively ended their collaboration - in fact, the Winklevosses dunned him more than $3,000 for ads on buses in the Pioneer Valley - and whatever plans they might have had for some sort of holding company "ended long before the commencement of the settlement negotiations between the Winklevoss brothers and Facebook."

Chang could, of course, appeal.