An individual author from Palo Alto, CA has sued a variety of defendants including several publishers, movie studios and author Ben Mezrich for copyright infringement, defamation, and other claims. The complaint alleges that the many popular tales of the founding of Facebook infringe plaintiff’s rights in his book Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era. The defamation claims (directed at Mezrich) stem from statements purportedly made by Mezrich that the plaintiff’s work was “irrelevant and of poor quality”, by Mezrich’s “selective omission” of the plaintiff’s contributions to the “verbal narrative concerning Facebook’s origins”, and by other unkind things said by Mezrich.
Greenspan v. Random House, Inc., 11-12000-RBC (D. Mass. Nov. 18, 2011)
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