US court doesn’t mind that Zuckerberg has stolen Facebook from his classmates

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was granted a favorable decision by a US appeals court in a legal battle against his former Harvard classmates who accuse him of stealing their idea for Facebook.

On Monday a US appeals court ruled that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss must accept a cash and stock settlement with Facebook that had been valued at $65 million.

However, New York man filed an amended lawsuit against Zuckerberg on Monday, citing a 2003 email in which Zuckerberg discusses an urgent need to launch his site before "a couple of upperclassmen" could launch theirs, an apparent reference to the Winklevoss twins.

According to the statement made by the Winklevoss brothers their settlement with Facebook was unfair because the company hid information from them during talks.

9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel that the twins were sophisticated negotiators aided by a team of lawyers.

"At some point, litigation must come to an end," Kozinski wrote. "That point has now been reached."

An attorney for the brothers, Jerome Falk Jr., said on Monday his clients would seek a rehearing before a larger, "en banc" group of 9th Circuit judges.

That larger group can overrule a three-judge panel, although only a fraction of cases undergo such a review. Should the 9th Circuit refuse to rehear the case, the last option would be an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.