Twins to Appeal Against $65M Lawsuit Deal From Facebook, Zuckerberg: Report

The twin brothers who received a $65 million settlement after a six-year legal battle with Facebook are now trying to undo that deal, the New York Times reported late Thursday.

In 2004, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, both Harvard graduates, sued Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The identical twins, 29, charged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for the social networking site from them and their friend Divya Narendra. All four were students at Harvard at the time.

The Winklevosses and Narendra settled for $65 million -- $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook shares -- in 2008.

However, next year the trio plan to ask a San Francisco federal appeals court to undo the deal so they can re-pursue the original case against Facebook and potentially win a bigger deal.

The twins say Zuckerberg misled them on the value of the deal and they received less than what was agreed upon.

“The principle is that they didn’t fight fair,” Tyler Winklevoss said. “The principle is that Mark stole the idea.”

Facebook says it did not do anything wrong and the twins are suffering from “settlers remorse.”

The Winklevosses are also engaged in a battle with the attorneys who helped them win the original settlement, firing and refusing to pay them. Recently, a court ordered the twins to pay the lawyers $13 million but the money remains in escrow.

Zuckerberg has previously denied stealing the concept for Facebook, saying that the Winklevoss-Narendra idea was for a dating site and not a social networking site.

In 2010, Facebook, surpassed Google as the top-visited website, accounting for 8.93 percent of all US visits between January and November 2010, the New York Post reported, citing web tracker Experian Hitwise.

The social networking site, which has 500 million users globally, is looking to expand into China, the world's most populous nation where access to Facebook is currently blocked by the government.