Google Accused of Racketeering. Lawsuit Claims 'Pattern' Of Trade Secret Thefts (mercurynews.com)

schwit1 quotes the Mercury News: In an explosive new allegation, a renowned architect has accused Google of racketeering, saying in a lawsuit the company has a pattern of stealing trade secrets from people it first invites to collaborate. Architect Eli Attia spent 50 years developing what his lawsuit calls "game-changing new technology" for building construction. Google in 2010 struck a deal to work with him on commercializing it as software, and Attia moved with his family from New York to Palo Alto to focus on the initiative, code-named "Project Genie." The project was undertaken in Google's secretive "Google X" unit for experimental "moonshots."

But then Google and its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin "plotted to squeeze Attia out of the project" and pretended to kill it but used Attia's technology to "surreptitiously" spin off Project Genie into a new company, according to the lawsuit... This week, a judge in Santa Clara County Superior Court approved the addition of racketeering claims to the lawsuit originally filed in 2014. Attia's legal team uncovered six other incidents in which Google had engaged in a "substantially similar fact pattern of misappropriation of trade secrets" from other people or companies, according to a July 25 legal filing from Attia.
Wired reported yesterday that Project Loon -- also a Google X project -- "is embroiled in a lawsuit with Space Data, a small company accusing Alphabet of patent infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and breach of contract following a failed acquisition bid."

The lawyer for the racketeering suit complains Google can deploy a "virtually unlimited budget to fight these things in court."

Comments

When will people finally realize

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a company not to be fucking trusted. I'm so done with Google - moved to Bing, Firefox, and any other replacement I can find.

Re:When will people finally realize

[mschwanke97402]

DuckDuckGo!

Re:When will people finally realize

[Anonymous Coward]

As a longtime Linux advocate this is a complete mindfuck for me. It's like getting back together with your skanky ex that cheated on you, but now she's grown up, mature, and dignified looking and you're somehow in a functional relationship. But you still sorta don't trust her even though you found out your other ex, Google, now has AIDS.

Re: When will people finally realize

[Anonymous Coward]

MS didn't steal technology they bought it. MS didn't own the dominate desktop applications for their own OS. DOS WordPerfect was the dominate word processor, DOS Lotus-123 was the dominate spreadsheet, DBASE was a leader of the desktop database, and Netscape owned 90% of the browser market. When MS moved from DOS to Windows most of these companies didn't put the effort into porting their applications to the new OS. They decided it was easier to sell their technologies to MS and reap a big pay day. However, Netscape surrendered a 90% market share due incompetent leadership. Even today their are a lot of people and companies who develop something new for the sole purpose of getting MS to buy them out.

Re:When will people finally realize

[PopeRatzo]

This is a company not to be fucking trusted. I'm so done with Google - moved to Bing, Firefox, and any other replacement I can find.

Your first mistake was ever trusting anyone with the last name, "Inc."

Don't believe - not for a minute - that there is any corporation on earth that can be trusted. Late-stage capitalism requires evilness. It's simply part of their equation and should be part of yours.

Re: When will people finally realize

[Anonymous Coward]

MS didn't steal technology they bought it.

You mean the way they didn't steal on-the-fly disk compression after a demonstration/discussion with Stacker? Or the way they didn't steal the design of their Dove-bar mouse after discussions with the original designer (can't recall the name ATM)?

When MS moved from DOS to Windows most of these companies didn't put the effort into porting their applications to the new OS.

Ri-i-ight. And Microsoft didn't withhold a buttload of API info from WordPerfect's devs while they used the info to improve Word.

Do a little research before defending the evil empire, chum.

Re:When will people finally realize

[RevDisk]

While I don't disagree with any of your comments, any time someone uses the term "late-stage capitalism"... Every origin story of the term I'm familiar with has roots in Marxism. Mostly I've seen it used by people angry at modern economics, but zero practical suggestions on how to correct it. Marxism as a fashion fad kind of thing, like wearing Che shirts that they bought with a credit card from a chain store, I suppose.

I'm far from a knee-jerk reactionary capitalist, but those guys didn't come up with a better solution. Private property and some form of capitalism has always existed whenever not outlawed by whoever was in power. While our modern economic situation has absolutely tons of problems, systemic ones at that, I've so far never heard of a remotely realistic large scale alternative.

Re: When will people finally realize

[lucm]

There needs to be more than that. They need to be afraid to behave this way. People need to be scared to work with or for them.

After the whole "we hate white men" thing I wrote them off and cancelled any service I had with them. And then we found out why they're so hell-bent on hiring women instead of men: they pay them less, a clever tactic that's about to become a class action. So this new information about their crooked business deals is not really a surprise.

The funny part is that the only Google product I still use is Chrome because for some reason it's the only browser that works with Spotify on Linux. A free Google product to use a paid service from a competitor...

Re:When will people finally realize

[rholtzjr]

This has more to do with greed and the quest for absolute power than it does with capitalism. Capitalism should not be conflated with evil, however it can be used as a tool when abused as with all tools. Remember always that it never has been the tool that is evil as they are usually inanimate object or concepts. It should always be remembered that it is the PERSON(S) who uses it for detriment that is the evil part.

Re:When will people finally realize

[GrumpySteen]

It's like getting back together with your skanky ex that cheated on you, but now she's grown up, mature, and dignified looking and you're somehow in a functional relationship.

Windows 10 is still sending fuckloads of your data to Microsoft. The skanky ex hasn't grown up or matured. She's had a boob job and you're too distracted by the tits to notice that she's swiping the contents of your wallet.

Re:When will people finally realize

[thegarbz]

Google can't be trusted so you moved to Microsoft. ... Are you high?

Re:When will people finally realize

[Rob Y.]

They may monitor for bugcatching and usability, but that's not why they monitor. They want the same kind of information the Google has - and they want to use it for the same purposes. And they're willing to stick themselves in between you and Google to grab it. Remember when Bing used to (did it ever stop?) forward your searches to Google and use the results to prop up the relevancy of their own?

If Google is really stealing people's ideas, that's pretty nasty and they should stop (or be stopped). But they came by the information about your preferences honestly - they traded you some pretty good services for it - including an open source browser that you can get without Google's spyware attached. Feel free to stop using those services if you're no longer comfortable with how they operate, but don't kid yourself that the replacements will be any better. I only occasionally find the results of Google's snooping to be creepy. Facebook, on the other hand, inundates me with ads for every commercial site I visit immediately after going there. It's like being stalked by any and all products you express an interest in. Super creepy - but probably pretty effective. I may even buy those SoftScience shoes one of these years...

You'd think there'd be a market for new services that sold you to advertisers in aggregate (based on age and sex - nothing more), like TV does. If people used those services, they'd be popular and profitable. But good luck getting funding to scale them up to compete with Google or Facebook or Bing or Outlook. The money guys want to maximize profit - they're not interested in a successful business that throws of a decent income. Still, if the public could persuade itself (cause nobody's going to pay to persuade them) to use such services, advertisers would be forced to support them - and their creators would get rich. And if they resisted going public, maybe they could stay rich without being forced to get greedy too...

Re:When will people finally realize

[dristoph]

"Private property and some form of capitalism has always existed whenever not outlawed by whoever was in power."

Uhh, big fat "citation needed" there. At the very least, you must acknowledge that *ubiquitous* private property is extremely young in terms of the span of human existence. For example, "enclosure", the practice of using state coercion to covert formerly communal agricultural land into private plots for private exploitation began in England and other parts of Europe only as recently as the 16th century. These policies were combined with new laws against vagrancy, essentially forcing the previous inhabitants into towns where they had no choice but to take up a wage job and become a tenant under a landlord to survive.

Furthermore, the vast majority of human history, talking hundreds of thousands of years, is one of nomads and hunter-gatherer communities which lived without private property.

You've made a bare assertion here, and it turns out it's completely untethered from history.

Re:When will people finally realize

[ChatHuant]

Google can't be trusted so you moved to Microsoft. ... Are you high?

There is a significant difference though. Microsoft wants to sell you stuff. You may not like the stuff they sell, but once they get your money the deal is done and finished. You can choose not to buy what they sell, and at this point you have no relationship with them - nothing to do with them or their products.

Google however doesn't want to sell you stuff. They want to sell YOU. You, your life, your very existence is what Google wants. Google's never-sleeping eye is on you all the time. They stalk you, on the web and outside it, whether you use any of their products or not. On the web, they'll follow you around, read your mail - if you're foolish enough to have a gmail account, log all your DNS queries if you're foolish enough to use their DNS servers. In real life, they'll log all the places you ever go, if you have an Android phone with location services. They'll get all your credit card transactions, without any way for you to stop it, or even be notified when they do. And now, they're even putting spies (sorry, "personal assistants") in your home to eavesdrop on anything anybody says. And there is no easy way to avoid them. Even if you don't use GMail, Google search or maps, lots and lots of non-Google web sites are happy to snitch on you - for example, Slashdot calls both gstatic and google-analytics.

If you don't trust Microsoft, you can live a Microsoft-free life. But, even if you don't trust Google, you have no way to avoid their collecting of YOUR data. You won't even know how your data ends up in their files. They don't particularly need your trust for that. This, in my opinion is an order of magnitude more evil than anything Microsoft has ever done.

Re: When will people finally realize

[ChrisMaple]

A court case decided that their implementation of disk compression was essentially a copy of Stacker's. It's not just the compression algorithm, it's also code details and user interface.

Any undocumented API call in a closed source OS is secret. They are commonplace, often just because they're experimental features, but in Microsoft's case it was to gain a competitive advantage.

Here's an example of how this might be done. Let's say that the OS has a documented call to put one character on the screen, which takes 1 microsecond, and an undocumented call to put up to 10,000 characters on the screen, which takes up to 50 microseconds. A program written by someone aware of the undocumented call can put 10,000 characters on the screen in 50 microseconds, but for anyone else putting 10,000 characters on the screen it's going to take 10,000 microseconds. That's a competitive advantage made possible by a secret API call.

Throwing their weight around

[Tablizer]

Well-known companies can be pushy dicks. I once contracted at a small-ish office equipment distributor, and it had an account with an entertainment conglomerate that starts with a "D". Big D would always request special conditions and special reports and wanted them ASAP. They were kept on because they served as bragging rights for the smaller company to bring in more business. "You know we are good because we have an account with D!" But after a while their dickativity exceeded their marketing value, and the distributor parted ways with them.

Reminds me of Bill Gates and MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone in the position of pitching paradigm-shifting inventions to tech giants should read this book, written by the founder of a company with a pen-based mobile device in the early '90s. John Sculley got wind of it because Kaplan tried to hire away a top Apple engineer, and told him too much; the result was Apple's "innovative" Newton product. Gates learned about it because Kaplan was hoping to partner with MS; Gates and his lieutenant Jeff Raikes spent a full day at Go going over every single gesture, then returned to Redmond where they proceeded to knock it off as Pen Windows. Kaplan also dishes on his eventual business partners IBM and AT&T.

Re:here's the correct link for Space Data V. Loon

[AuMatar]

?? Isn't that something hot air balloons have done for a century?

Re:Company mottos are always aspirational

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt a company gives one fuck about whether it's motto was true or not, so long as it helps bring in money.

Re:Nice legal ploy. it will never work

[taustin]

The judge will laugh him out of court.

The judge has already approved adding the racketeering charge to the suit. Not sure of the rules under California's RICO, but it's probably similar to federal rules. That means that the plaintiff has shown some pretty compelling evidence, and it becomes very difficult to stop it from proceeding to trial, once it's been certified.

The police, or at least the DA have to be involved to file a racketeering charge. Not going to happen.

Patently untrue. Both federal and California RICO statutes allow for private enforcement. A prosecutor would be necessary for criminal prosecution, but state RICO laws allow for treble damages in civil cases, which could easily run into the billions. It's difficult to do, but the judge has already been convinced to allow it.

why is this news?

Why do you comment on something you clearly know nothing about?

Re:here's the correct link for Space Data V. Loon

[lucm]

The article is worth a read.

At a TED talk in 2014, Google’s then-CEO Larry Page said: “We did some weather simulations which probably hadn't really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them and other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go.”

Both men were describing the engineering feat that Space Data had sought to patent more than a decade earlier. Filings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) show that in 2000, Space Data began experimenting with a nationwide paging service from high-altitude balloons. Space Data filed its key patent application in 2001, and quickly went on to test text messages in 2002, phone calls in 2006, and 4G LTE data by 2012—a year before Google’s splashy launch.

What a bunch of common thieves and hypocrites

Re:Nice legal ploy. it will never work

[chromaexcursion]

This case has not gone to trial.
These are only pre-trial motions.
The judge you've sited is not the trial judge.
This case will probably never go to trial. All of this is just posturing!

Google is not very innocent, either

[Skapare]

today, i wanted to watch a PBS TV show i missed, so i went to YouTube to see if it was there. there were tons of hour long videos with that title and episode (Finding Your Roots, season 4 episode 1) but were replaced with a link due to a copyright claim. but this link went to a scam site trying to get your credit card number, despite claims that it was free, and not to PBS. apparently Google will take a copyright claim from anyone, including scammers.

Re:Google is not very innocent, either

[thegarbz]

You're overthinking it. Those videos are pending to be copyright claims. They are just scams. Anyone can upload one like it.

Re:8==D=O==N=O==E=V=I=L==D-~~-_.

[Anonymous Coward]

You may or may not know this, but the most frequent phrases used by evil people is "Trust me" or "Trust us." They say the opposite of what they mean, like "Do no evil."