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Affinity Engines Says Google Stole Orkut Code
GillBates0 writes "Wired's reporting that a social networking software company called Affinity Engines has filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that much of the source code behind Orkut, the search engine's popular social service, was stolen by former engineer Orkut Buyukkokten. They claim that he illegally took the code the he had written for the company -- which he co-founded -- with him when he joined Google and that Buyukkokten promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn't develop a competing social network service for Google. '"In its initial investigation, AEI uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs ... in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in Orkut.com," according to the lawsuit.'"
It was Affinity that was rejecting the neutral expert, and Google that was offering.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
I want to know why Orkut is rejecting the netural expert.
Orkut's the guy who moved from Affinity Engines to Google, and seems to be what Google's product is named after.
Affinity Engines is who's rejecting the offer.
Either way, isn't the Friendster social network bullshit thing over yet?
-PM
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Well this was supposedly his 'personal' project that he was working on during the time Google allocates to their engineers. The fact that it was all written using MS stuff and asp surprised me when I first started using it. I think that Google shouldn't be blamed, but Orkut may have some 'splaining to do...
The promise is irrelevant if Google is essentially running an unlicensed copy of Affinity's proprietary code.
-PM
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I quite agree - it's not even as if Orkut was commisioned by Google, the employee in question did it in his free time in which Google allows employees to persue personal projects.
Typically in lawsuits like this, if the act was a willful violation of contract terms and/or copyright, they can get rather substantial penalties beyond actual damages. If Google can show that this programmer introduced this code in spite of their efforts to prevent such things, rather than as a result of encouragement to get it out the door, they may be off the hook for these extra damages (punitive and statutory) though I don't think the programmer has much of a chance at that. Of course, establishing the value of actual damages in a case like this is always difficult as well. Hopefully they'll be able to settle with a licensing agreement that makes everybody mostly happy. Google probably has the resources to rewrite everything, but at this point that's probably not practical.
I hope this doesn't put too much of a damper on the 20% projects at Google. They keep turning out a lot of really cool stuff because of those, and it would be really unfortunate if liability forced them to micromanage their research.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
This is true.
I get weird timeout errors. Stay idle for 30 minutes it makes you sign on again(such a pet peeve on websites), fine. But it was doing that to me for 30 SECONDS of inactivity.
2. The message boards are dead
3. Random error 500s out of nowhere. C'mon Google isn't supposed to break!
4. A total sausage fest.
I suggest you RTFA before posting this. Google suggested getting a neutral party to evaluate the claim. Affinity refused. It sounds like Affinity is trying to pull an SCO...
Doh!
a simple promise won't really hold much water in court.
Bah! Not according to contract law in the US...
Have a look here: A contract is any promise or set of promises made by one party to another for the breach of which the law provides a remedy. The promise or promises may be express (either written or oral) or may be implied from circumstances. and here: Contrary to common wisdom, an informal exchange of promises can still be binding and legally as valid as a written contract.An oral promise can be just as legally binding as any written agreement.
Nope. A Cease and Desist is a nasty-gram from the lawyers telling you that you should stop what you're doing. Usually involving threats of lawsuits. An injunction is a court order to stop doing it.
Why?
In California, you can't prevent someone from moving around to competing companies in their field of work. Even if Buyukkokten signed 100 agreements saying he wouldn't develop another social networking product for another company, the contract is deemed invalid under California law.
What he can't do is reveal trade secrets to the new company, or if it is reasonable to expect that he will divulge such secrets in the normal course of his work.
So the fact that he signed agreements saying that he wouldn't create a competing product is 100% baseless. He can do this, even if he agreed not to.
It is up to him to ensure that he didn't steal any code or use trade secrets from AE in his work at Google, and an independent source code review would reveal this. If he did steal code, then he's up shit creek. If he didn't, then the whole thing is just to extract money.
I'm pretty sure that Google would have already gone through the due diligence to ask this guy if he did steal the code. He would be **really** stupid to deny it if he did because so much is on the line. I think if it has gone this far, Google is fairly confident that the code was new work.
I bet AE is delaying the neutral code review in hopes that Google will just pay them money to go away before their IPO.
European countries use the dot to separate thousands and the comma to start the decimal fraction, exactly the inverse of what we Americans do. Take off the blinders and try living in the larger world.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Since Google is a corporation, although private, and the employee was acting as Google. A corporation is a legal person composed of the resources, employees, money, debts, and claims of the business. An independant suit can follow and may be later combined with the current suit against the individual employee. Suits are brought against both because one is making money off of stolen profits, and the other stole the code.
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Not sure from a family perspective that I see this (your anonymous post) as funny. In my fathers case, the doctors detected elevated enzymes (which I understand indicate a heart attack), but they were unable to determine exactly when they would have happened. Their findings were inconclusive as to wether it was a heard attack or possibly a seizure or some other condition.
Back to point though, the cause of the accident wasn't exactly what I would consider company related, but the lawyers see it that way.
Actually, that only applies to criminal cases.
No it doesn't. In civil proceedings judgement is made on balance of probability based on the arguments made. Ie, whichever side's arguments are the more probable as being correct are the side in whose favour judgement will be made. Innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt applies to the defendants in criminal proceedings only (at least in jurisdictions which descend or drew from british common law at least, eg what is now the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia, much of Africa, etc.., damn brits have ruled most of the world at one stage or the other.)
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.