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" &amp;quot;One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.&amp;quot;\u2014 Samuel Butler In the annals of the aggrieved, nobody has it over Hans Kohlhase. A figure of German legend, Kohlhase was a 16th-century Brandenburg merchant who was taking his wares to the Leipzig fair one day when he found himself detained by the servants of a Saxon nobleman. The men, as was their brutish custom, demanded Kohlhase&amp;#039;s horses. Kohlhase complied, though the inconvenience cost him precious time and money. When, as he was heading home, the lackeys tried to exact a toll for the horses&amp;#039; return, the merchant balked. Finally, seeing no other way out, he paid the fee, but vowed to seek redress in a court of law. The courts failed him. Furious, Kohlhase set out on a course of revenge against not only the nobleman but all of Saxony. Gathering a motley crew of ruffians and criminals, he tore a years-long swath through northwestern Germany, burning down villages and terrorizing the citizenry. At long last the rampage was quelled when the authorities finally captured the vengeful madman. Within weeks he was broken on the wheel in Berlin. Reading about the latest legal machinations of the Winklevoss twins, I confess I wondered: Is it too outr\u00E9 to pine for the return of the wheel? Ah, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the two-headed Veruca Salt of our unbridled age. Thanks to the hit movie The Social Network, the essence of their gripe is now common knowledge: Young men of privilege from Greenwich, Connecticut, identical twins, are Harvard juniors in late 2002 when they team up with a classmate, Divya Narendra, to develop HarvardConnection (later incorporated as ConnectU), a university-wide social networking site. According to the Winklevosses, the three invite fellow student Mark Zuckerberg to join the team as a programmer after much of the groundwork for the project has already been laid. With access to the half-built site and all of the existing code, Zuckerberg then ducks the men&amp;#039;s repeated efforts at communication. Ten weeks after entering an oral agreement with the founders of HarvardConnection, Zuckerberg launches a rival site, Thefacebook.com. Facebook will swiftly conquer a generation and transform the concept of friendship forever. All of which will make Mark Zuckerberg very, very rich. And the Winklevosses very, very angry. Let&amp;#039;s face it: The Facebook story doesn&amp;#039;t pull at the heartstrings. Harvard graduates fighting over multiples of millions isn&amp;#039;t exactly To Kill a Mockingbird. But at least at the outset the Winklevosses were winning in the court of public opinion. Evidence put forth during their 2004 lawsuit strongly suggested that Zuckerberg was in breach of contract, albeit an unwritten one. And he obviously had access to HarvardConnection&amp;#039;s source code, the same code he employed in his site. An instant message sent by Zuckerberg to a friend about the twins, later leaked to the public, didn&amp;#039;t exactly help his case, either: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m going to f*** them,&amp;quot; it said. The initial dispute ended with a settlement in 2008. Facebook would pay the Winklevosses and Narendra $20 million, plus shares of the company, for a total reported value of $65 million. The twins had struck a blow not only for intellectual property rights but for the central code of gentlemanly conduct: A deal is a deal. Except now they&amp;#039;re saying it isn&amp;#039;t. And nobody can stand these guys anymore. Call it Greed Fatigue. After the financial shipwrecking so many have suffered over the last few years, it&amp;#039;s hard not to cringe at the sight of two people in Herm\u00E8s ties who have everything claiming they deserve more. The first time I saw a photograph of the Winklevoss twins, I actually laughed out loud. Not only are they wealthy and Ivy League-educated (and members of Harvard&amp;#039;s uptight and exclusive Porcellian Club, which dates back to 1791), they&amp;#039;re six-foot-five-inch granite-jawed Olympic athletes, to boot. Stars of the Harvard crew team, the two competed in the Beijing Games, then moved to Oxford, where they could be seen shearing the still waters of the Thames while pursuing their MBAs. They&amp;#039;re now stateside, training for the 2012 Games in London. These are people of enormous accomplishment, and no thoughtful person would begrudge them their many hard-won gifts. But for a couple of big, talented guys with amazing hair who are so good at winning, they&amp;#039;ve proved to be remarkably small and inept at the more unfamiliar business of losing. Last January the Winklevosses brought a fresh complaint before the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Claiming securities fraud, they argued that in the original mediation, Facebook provided a misleading valuation of its shares. Their payout, say the Winklevosses, should have been four times as much as what they accepted. (Their shares are now worth at least $160 million.) A three-judge panel hearing their claims proved highly skeptical. Among other doubts, one judge pointed out that Facebook&amp;#039;s internal assessment was only an opinion, which could have been challenged by the Winklevoss team but was not. Asked by the court how two elite scholars with first-rate counsel could even suggest they had been taken advantage of, the twins&amp;#039; own lawyer, Jerome Falk, replied resignedly, &amp;quot;I agree. My clients were not behind the barn door when brains were given out.&amp;quot; They may, however, have missed the class wagon. Certainly the two seem unmoved by a spirit of temperance that, in a world cleaved by inequality, would serve them better, signifying a largeness of character to match their sinewy muscles. But who knows? Maybe temperance is a quaint notion, gone the way of prudent bankers and undersharing. The Winklevosses have come of age at a critical moment. For decades we have blithely carried on under a banner almost patriotic in its Americanness: Excess is good, but unconscionable is best \u2014 something that may actually apply to Zuckerberg more than to the Winklevosses. We have been a nation of plaintiffs, whiners, and grabbers, and so far no economic downturn \u2014 or moral chastening that accompanies it \u2014 seems to have changed that. We celebrate the vulgarian splendor of &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; housewives on one cable channel, the overheated punditry of minority legislators on the next. We upgrade, inhale, and discard, stuck, it would appear, with all the supersized egos that have grown hale from the feeding of this particular beast. In the end, perhaps it&amp;#039;s unfair to expect these gentlemen to exit graciously when nobody else is willing to. Mr. Kohlhase, have you met Kanye West? He&amp;#039;s in the green room with Charlie Sheen and The Donald. And yet, isn&amp;#039;t our collective distaste for the Facebook affair a sign of our better instincts, a recognition of the fundamental importance of lessons we first learned on the playground? No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, you probably remember the pride you felt watching a candidate deliver a gracious concession speech. There&amp;#039;s a feeling of safety that comes with knowing the system works, that the wheels of democracy are bolted on tight and that tomorrow \u2014 unlike in so many other countries \u2014 our more or less civil society will roll on. It is also often our best &amp;quot;losers&amp;quot; who have the most successful second acts. Andrew Jackson lost a bitterly contested election to John Quincy Adams in 1824, but his enduring popularity allowed him to capture the presidency four years later. Al Gore won the Nobel Prize seven years after his bruising battle with George W. Bush. Hillary Clinton is a commanding secretary of state. Even John McCain, who grouched his way to a near-forfeiture of his hero status in 2008, charmed supporters and detractors alike by yielding so elegantly to Barack Obama. If anyone is well situated to accept defeat and move on to greater things, it should be the fortunate &amp;quot;Winklevii.&amp;quot; On April 11 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed down a unanimous decision enforcing the original agreement between Facebook and ConnectU. &amp;quot;At some point, litigation must come to an end,&amp;quot; the judgment stated. &amp;quot;That point has now been reached.&amp;quot; Unfortunately, not really: The Winklevosses have already appealed. They are world-class competitors, after all, spurred on no doubt by a culture that has made famous the Vince Lombardi adage &amp;quot;Show me a gracious loser and I&amp;#039;ll show you a loser.&amp;quot; Too bad they can&amp;#039;t see that they&amp;#039;ve already won. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a982/winklevoss-brothers-profile/>