Persistence — even if it is the whiny, likely undeserved, lunkheaded legal version of it — certainly pays off.

But you have to marvel at the bizarre karma going on, given that my favorite matching pair of digital ottomans, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, are poised to collect up to $300 million from the shares they got in a settlement with Facebook and its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg over the founding of the social networking giant.

That’s right, folks, the rich do get richer, especially if they pursue their case well past the point of shame.

It’s not clear how many of the 1.2 million shares the Winklevii still have from the settlement they got in 2008, since they wrangled with their own lawyers over it, and the stock has also split.

But let’s assume the Olympic rowers kept a chunk, which will be worth a lot of gold-plated oars if Facebook reaches the upward of $80 billion valuation it is expected to in its upcoming initial public offering.

Facebook filed its long-expected IPO earlier this week.

And here’s a lovely tweet about the IPO from Cameron Winklevoss, who is looking very fetching on his Twitter page, even if it is perhaps about time to lose the rower meme image thing, given he’s on the closer side of 30 years old.

We r excited 4the #FacebookIPO + wish the company + all involved the very best,an amazing accomplishment! cc @tylerwinklevoss @DivyaNarendra

— Cameron Winklevoss (@winklevoss) February 2, 2012

He sent it to his twin brother, Tyler, and also to Divya Narendra, their other partner in the ill-fated ConnectU service.

Without going into all the well-gone-over deets (go see the Aaron Sorkin-penned movie and believe about 26 percent of it), ConnectU was the Harvard University dating site that Zuckerberg allegedly submarined in order to start Facebook.

Well, presumably water under bridge — unless you are talking about the perpetually disgruntled Winklevii.

At the time they finally dropped their seven-year fraud lawsuit this past summer, they then reopened to a different one then pending.

“The Social Network 2: The Overly Compensated Vii Strike Back,” anyone?

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It seems Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Don Quixote twins of the digital age, have tilted at yet another legal windmill unsuccessfully.

So now, after losing another court challenge to overturn a previous court challenge, they’ll have to settle for $65 million.

Actually, $100 million, which is how much shares in Facebook have appreciated since the pair and also Divya Narendra settled with the social networking giant.

Said the ruling from the U.S. Circuit of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in part:

The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace. And the courts might have obliged, had the Winklevosses not settled their dispute and signed a release of all claims against Facebook. With the help of a team of lawyers and a financial advisor, they made a deal that appears quite favorable in light of recent market activity. For whatever reason, they now want to back out. Like the district court, we see no basis for allowing them to do so. At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached.

The end? Say it ain’t so! BoomTown, for one, will miss those big lugs.

Not so much Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, especially since the pair allege the tech wunderkind stole the idea for the start-up while a student at Harvard University.

After much legal mishegas, they got $20 million and 1.25 million shares at a price of $8.88 each.

And that’s more than enough, said court to the the Winklevii–it’s their eternal nickname in Silicon Valley now–and they can’t back out of a settlement they made in 2004.

As for the specifics, the three-judge panel struck down every Winklevoss argument:

- They said the terms of the Facebook deal introduced after mediation were typical.

- They said Winklevii should have been sophisticated enough to understand valuation.

- They said Winklevii couldn’t use the sealed mediation settlement documents to argue their case.

It’s true, but it’s also sad to see it all over, since all the litigiousness between Zuckerberg and the Olympic rowing brothers has been so dramatic that it was the subject of the almost Oscar-winning movie, “The Social Network.”

But maybe they can go to the Supreme Court! One can dream!

And with their latest loss and all the Google machinating against Facebook, who’s up for a sequel: “Geek Wars: The Empire and the Vii Strike Back.”

In a statement, Colin Stretch, deputy general counsel of Facebook said: “We appreciate the Ninth Circuit’s careful consideration of this case and are pleased the court has ruled in Facebook’s favor.”

Here’s the full ruling:

08-16745

But the Olympic rowers and one-time social networking entrepreneurs–one twin’s suit was more pin-striped than the next–were back at it this morning in San Francisco for their biggest hearing yet, in front of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Unfortunately for them, Facebook’s more polished presentation seemed to go over better with the judges than the Winklevoss’ claim they had been unprepared and uninformed when they finalized a previous settlement.

While I sought network connectivity in the back of the extra-large ornate courtroom, wishing for a Verizon iPhone hotspot, the twins sat stoically and silently in the front as Facebook’s attorney, Orrick partner Joshua Rosenkranz, urged them to let it go, saying they are “big boys,” and “big boys can make deals that bind them.”

The Winklevii, as Silicon Valley folks like to call them, are rehashing a settlement with Facebook from three years ago over the events of seven years ago.

They have now hired new lawyers and appealed a previous judgment, having accused their previous lawyers of malpractice and withheld their attorney fees (a case they also lost).

The twins want that 2008 settlement–which had Facebook buy their ConnectU social network for $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook shares, at that time considered .3 percent of the company–revoked, so they can resume their original lawsuit over Mark Zuckerberg flaking on their project while he started Facebook.

In December, they reportedly considered dropping the matter entirely and keeping what they have already pocketed, but decided they must keep fighting.

The settlement of 2008 was invalid, argued Winklevoss lawyer Jerome Falk of Howard Rice in court today, because terms were not finalized before it was signed, and in particular the portion of the settlement awarded in stock was at a valuation about four times higher than Facebook’s internal valuation at the time.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard from both Falk and Rosenkranz at length, allowing them to exceed their expected time to thoroughly discuss the case. A ruling should be forthcoming about three months from now.

The discussion focused on precise details of California and federal securities law and case law about, for example, whether a mediation session that was confidential could be opened to evaluate whether fraud occurred.

Others involved in the case, such as Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss’ ConnectU o-founder Divya Narendra, were not in attendance.

From the cheap seats, it seemed that the judges were more critical of the Winklevoss argument. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski (pictured here) was quite skeptical of the ideas that Facebook needed to disclose its internal valuation and that the settlement agreement signed after mediation was somehow informal.

Judge J. Clifford Wallace commented that the Winklevosses are clearly quite capable and were well-represented during the mediation by their team of lawyers and their father, a former business school professor at Wharton.

“I agree my clients were not behind the barn door when the brains were passed out,” replied Falk.

Judge Barry Silverman harped on why the Winklevosses hadn’t directly asked Facebook what its current valuation was. “This question could have been asked, should have been asked and wasn’t asked,” he said.

In the hallway and outside the courthouse, the Winklevii themselves would only politely say that they look forward to the court’s ruling. Chased by reporters and photographers, they made a quick exit.

Meanwhile Facebook Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy VP Elliot Schrage, who had brought his two young sons to see the hearing in person, commented that the issues at stake are much more exacting details than the personal story of Zuckerberg and the Winklevosses that’s now widely known (in large part due to its Hollywood portrayal in “The Social Network”).

Falk said he thought the court was “thorough and well-prepared,” and he was grateful the court allowed the full arguments to be made.

Besides not willing to compromise their honor, the Winklevii can trace much of their dispute to problems reaching formal agreements, especially with Zuckerberg and his cronies.

They never got Zuckerberg to sign a contract to work for them back at Harvard, and then years later when they got him to settle, they allowed Facebook to set terms that weren’t fully scoped out.

Obviously, they later came to regret it.

Falk said on the courthouse steps that his clients don’t actually want their settlement retroactively valued (combining the Winklevoss’ chosen price and Facebook’s current valuation, their shares would be worth something like $608 million today), but rather to “get their lawsuit back,” so they can keep pursuing it.

Which would mean: More Winklevii!

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The brief was actually filed back in June, and I found a better, watermark-free copy of it here on the Web site of the Winklevoss lawyers. Last night I took the time to read it in full, and it was surprisingly not boring.

Perhaps the most revelatory thing in the Facebook filing is that Facebook’s lawyers seem to be having fun with the case. Their writing is laden with imagery and over-the-top exasperation with the Winklevii’s allegedly poorly formed legal arguments. Here’s the dramatic intro to the brief:

This appeal arises from the settlement of rancorous litigation on two coasts. On one side were Appellees Facebook, Inc. and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. On the other side were the Appellants, who founded a failing competitor of Facebook’s called ConnectU. The CU Founders claimed that they had the idea for Facebook first, and Facebook stole their idea. Facebook denied those claims and, for its part, accused ConnectU and its Founders of unlawfully infiltrating its systems, stealing millions of email addresses, and then spamming them. During a global mediation, the parties signed a “Term Sheet and Settlement Agreement.” In the interest of achieving litigation peace, Facebook agreed to purchase ConnectU for [redacted] dollars and [redacted] shares of Facebook stock, one of the hottest startups in the world. Surrounded by a bevy of lawyers, the CU Founders signed the deal. Then they suffered a bout of settlers’ remorse. They ask this Court to relieve them of the deal they struck to plunge back into scorched-earth litigation.

Besides the writing, the other thing that’s interesting is the information about the terms of the relationship between Facebook and ConnectU. While the story has been simplified into a Hollywood-style betrayal as portrayed in “The Social Network,” the outcome of Zuckerberg and the Winklevii’s legal mediation is much less widely reported.

As part of its settlement with the Winklevoss twins, Facebook agreed to acquire their social network ConnectU (which they eventually did find someone to build), and has been “operating” it since Dec. 2008, the filing says (the site itself is offline).

Facebook contends that this earlier agreement to buy ConnectU was final, while the Winklevii are calling it a draft (their co-founder Divya Narendra has publicly said he’s moved past the Zuckerberg vendetta, though he’s mentioned in the filings as well).

The settlement came after closed-door professional mediation in February 2008. Facebook says it’s outraged that the Winklevii and their lawyers are bringing conversations from mediation back into the appeal, because all involved were sworn to confidentiality.

(You can also read the ConnectU appeal brief for the case to which Facebook was responding. However the bits from the mediation that were supposed to be confidential have been blacked out.)

But after the settlement, ConnectU came back to the table asking for its share to be revalued. It had originally negotiated using a publicly reported valuation from when Microsoft invested in Facebook, rather than an internal valuation from around the same time that would have priced the shares much lower ($8.88 versus $35.90). A revaluation of the shares to a smaller amount would give the twins a larger stake in the company.

And also, the Winklevii wanted the transaction to be labeled a merger instead of an acquisition so they could avoid paying some taxes on it.

Facebook replied in the June brief, again in remarkably florid fashion:

“First, the CU Founders try to leave this Court with the impression that the only valuation figure they knew was the $15 billion figure from the Microsoft press release, and that they, therefore, had reason to enshrine it as gospel. They also portray the one 409A valuation on which they rely here as some seismic event in the life of the company, as if an unexpected bolt of lightning from on high emblazoned $8.88 onto a couple of tablets. Both the impressions are false.”

Facebook, by the way, to add insult to injury, says the internal valuation of its shares at the time of the Microsoft investment was actually even lower than the Winklevoss lawyers are arguing: Six days before the Microsoft transaction, Facebook had filed a document valuing employee stock options at just $6.61.

The attorney who signed the Facebook brief is Monte Cooper of Orrick, an intellectual property specialist. I hope he also writes novels in his spare time.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Frankly, I’m kind of appalled that they’re threatening me after the work I’ve done for them free of charge, but after dealing with a bunch of other groups with deep pockets and good legal connections including companies like Microsoft, I can’t say I’m surprised. I try to shrug it off as a minor annoyance that whenever I do something successful, every capitalist out there wants a piece of the action.”

–Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, February 2004

The inane dispute over the provenance of Facebook apparently ended in a multimillion dollar resolution. Facebook has reportedly paid the founders of ConnectU $65 million to settle a lawsuit that accused founder Mark Zuckerberg of lifting the social network’s source code and business plan when he worked for it as a programmer. A nice little financial windfall for the founders of ConnectU–brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their colleague, Divya Narendra. Facebook certainly has money to pay to make the suit go away and a very good reason to pay it: It would be poor form to leave its quaint little creation myth in dispute.

News of the “confidential agreement” was apparently broken by ConnectU’s legal counsel, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, which inadvertently disclosed it in a promotion for its legal services.

“Lawyers in the heavyweight fight had expended great effort to keep the settlement secret–even going as far as persuading a judge to clear the courtroom of reporters on one occasion,” The Recorder reports. “But ConnectU’s former lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges published the settlement amount in a firm advertisement trumpeting the firm’s prowess. ‘WON $65 million settlement against Facebook’ appears, along with dozens of other Quinn outcomes from last year, in the firm’s January business litigation newsletter.”

All parties involved declined comment on the “confidential settlement.”