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Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

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Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#81

Post by delhanty »

ak39 wrote: post #62
delhanty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing this. Sorry to hear about how you were given the run around. It reminded me of the advice from one of Paul Graham's essays: Don't Talk to Corp Dev [1] >Distractions are the thing you can least afford in a startup. And conversations with corp dev are the worst sort of distraction, because as well as consuming your attention they undermine your morale. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

This advice is gold. But it isn’t easy to overcome the temptation of imagining that any convo with any division of mega Corp is the lucky break you always hoped for.

>But it isn’t easy to ...

Surely that's a significant understatement. Once mega copy dev has planted that idea in one's mind it must be hard to kill off. So maybe one needs to have thought about the possibility of an unwelcome approach and have a plan to kill it.

Maybe:

1. Ask mega corp to authenticate themselves - maybe by posting a pre-agree shared secret on their corporate blog.

2. Post the approach from mega copy dev on one's own blog telling them to go away. Eg. "I received the following unwelcome approach from a large Mountain View search company - details redacted (snark) ..."

Comments?

Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#82

Post by pishpash »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #80
pishpash wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simplistic. Why would they go to the trouble of "cutting out the people who originated these ideas" if they are already at X Labs and the project was to continue?

Simple, because then they'd have to share the profits with them.

Google is big and has plenty of money. It sounds more like politics than anything financially motivated.

Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#83

Post by Sylos »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6
QAPereo wrote: post #4

That’s pretty much unequivocally evil, right? Seriously though, if this guy has a real case, Google is going to have a truly miserable time in court.

It depends. The article suggests the plaintiff may not have properly protected his intellectual property ahead of time. It may be very hard to get a court to side against Google if what Google did was technically legal. Evil and illegal are two different things, and sadly, they quite often do not align.

This isn't about the single case of the guy getting legally taken away his rights.

The accusation is that Google has a routine set up for doing this, therefore is very much knowingly taking away people's rights against their will.

Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

alehul wrote: post #2

> Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a judge in the case noted last year that the firm has argued that Attia gave Google rights to his technology “without a condition of later payment.” So Google's defense isn't even that the substance of the accusations are false, but that they had the legal ability to do so? Is this common behavior for Google, if the story is true? This may be naive, b…

> So Google's defense isn't even that the substance of the accusations are false, but that they had the legal ability to do so?

Without additional context of the judges statement (or, better, either the actual filings in the case), that's far from clear.

It's not impossible or even uncommon for a defendant in a case to make an argument in the style of “I didn't take it, and, even if I had, I had permission to take it.”

You can't infer the nonexistence of the first part of the claim from the existence of the second.

Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#86

Post by paul7986 »

rdtsc wrote: post #11
alehul wrote: post #2

> Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a judge in the case noted last year that the firm has argued that Attia gave Google rights to his technology “without a condition of later payment.” So Google's defense isn't even that the substance of the accusations are false, but that they had the legal ability to do so? Is this common behavior for Google, if the story is true? This may be naive, b…

> Is this common behavior for Google, if the story is true? It depends on details of his contract. It's quite plausible his employment contract in "Project X" did say that he would transfer knowledge and ideas in exchange for money. It's pretty standard stuff. In other words, it might not be exactly a slam dunk case. A racketeering charge seems pretty outrageous as well. However if Google did these things (which look…

Based on my similar experience with Google ATAP I bet they do this a lot! I've detailed my experience below...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15422475

Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#87

Post by bsjob »

Teever wrote: post #85

Man it would be so terrifying going up against Google in court. How do you do research? How do you communicate with your lawyer? They know everything about what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with.

You do realize that there exists software that is not made by Google, right?

Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#88

Post by klodolph »

Teever wrote: post #85

Man it would be so terrifying going up against Google in court. How do you do research? How do you communicate with your lawyer? They know everything about what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with.

If you sue the phone company, they don't cut off your service or tap your phones.

Re: Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit

#89

Post by blammo999 »

Teever wrote: post #85

Man it would be so terrifying going up against Google in court. How do you do research? How do you communicate with your lawyer? They know everything about what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with.

You do realize that there exists software that isn't made by Google, right? Oh, also books exist.
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