Greenspan v. Random House, Inc. et al

Aaron Greenspan, creator of the 2003 predecessor to The Facebook at Harvard University also called "The Facebook"—of which Mark Zuckerberg was a member—sued popular author Benjamin Mezrich, his publisher Random House, and Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement, defamation and false advertising due to the statements made by Mezrich in and about his book "The Accidental Billionaires." Mezrich's book, which cites Greenspan's as a source, has been marketed as supposed non-fiction, even though the story is full of inconsistencies and outright falsifications, many of which Mezrich admits to. Mezrich notably omitted Greenspan's role in the creation of the website and set the false Mark Zuckerberg "genius" narrative in motion in his book, leading to the eventual motion picture "The Social Network" and contributing to the frenzy surrounding Facebook's problematic IPO.

The case was dismissed for a number of reasons. Greenspan, a first-time pro se litigant, was not fully familiar with court procedure at the time. In addition, Massachusetts does not recognize the tort of defamation by omission, whereas other states do. Judge Collings had also heard part of the Winklevoss litigation in his court and may have been skeptical that yet another Harvard student claimed to be involved in the site's creation, even though Greenspan's work pre-dated both Harvard Connection (later ConnectU) and Zuckerberg's Facebook, Greenspan was in the same computer science independent study as Zuckerberg, and Greenspan actually wrote software source code, whereas the Winklevosses did not.

Judge Collings issued an opinion containing two errors that made the case essentially impossible to appeal. First, instead of a dictionary, he cited a website editable by anyone, wiki.answers.com, to define the term "non-fiction." Then he pasted the wrong URL from that website into his opinion, so that the definition on the written page did not match what the website actually said. Greenspan, reading the erroneous opinion, filed his appeal on the basis of what the opinion said, using the wrong definition at the court-provided wrong URL. When he discovered the error after the fact, the First Circuit Court of Appeals refused to acknowledge that any error had even been made, or that citing a wiki was a problem in the first place. On appeal to the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor failed to recuse herself from the vote on consideration of the case even though she had a multi-million dollar contract with Random House herself.

The portion of Collings's case opinion erroneously defining "non-fiction" based on the wrong wiki.answers.com URL was later cited by a different judge to let infamous con artist athlete Lance Armstrong off the hook for selling a false memoir.

Greenspan settled with Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2009, which the book and the movie also omitted.