Facebook has unveiled the "smoking gun evidence" that it says effectively destroys Paul Ceglia's ownership case against the social-networking site: the actual contract between Ceglia and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg.
In a Monday filing, Facebook lawyers said court-ordered forensic testing has uncovered the "authentic" contract between Ceglia and Zuckerberg, which only mentions Ceglia's company StreetFax and "has nothing to do with Facebook."
"This smoking-gun evidence confirms what [Facebook has] said all along: the purported contract ... is an outright fabrication," Facebook argued.
Facebook also accused Ceglia of hiding relevant documents, including six USB and other storage devices that included the Zuckerberg contract.
"It is very likely that Ceglia used these removable devices to manipulate and store documents, including the purported 'Facebook contract,' in the belief that this evidence would not be discovered — or that the devices could easily be discarded if necessary, as Ceglia has now apparently done," Facebook argued. "This is the digital equivalent of throwing critical evidence into Lake Erie."
If the court does not throw out the case, Facebook said it will move to have it dismissed based on the "now-overwhelming evidence of Ceglia's fraud, spoliation, and subterfuge."
Who is Paul Ceglia? In 2003, he hired Zuckerberg to do coding work for a company called StreetFax. Ceglia said Zuckerberg then persuaded Ceglia to invest in Facebook—$1,000 for a 50 percent stake in the company, plus an extra 1 percent stake for every day Facebook was not online past January 1, 2004. Ceglia, therefore, claimed to have an 84 percent stake in the social-networking site.
Though this all reportedly went down in 2004, Ceglia didn't actually take any legal action on the matter until last year. He told Bloomberg that he probably would have forgotten all about it had he not been arrested for fraud. Ceglia said he only unearthed the alleged contract while trying to hunt down assets to pay customers of a failed wool-pellet business. Facebook argued that a normal person wouldn't simply "forget" that they owned a majority stake in the world's most popular social-networking site.
Ceglia appeared to have a smoking gun of his own in April, when he produced some rather entertaining emails he said were written by Zuckerberg. Facebook, however, maintained that Ceglia was a scam artist. Ceglia has since switched legal teams.
For more, Wired has posted a copy of what Facebook said is the real contract.