Google Sued for $1B Over Outlook Migration Tool 332
A two-count lawsuit filed by Chicago company LimitNone alleges that Google misappropriated trade secrets and violated Illinois' consumer fraud laws when it developed "Google Email Uploader" which competes with LimitNone's "gMove" application.
"Google claims its core philosophy is 'Don't be evil' but, simply put, they invited us to work with them, to trust them — and then stole our technology,'" said Ray Glassman, CEO of LimitNone, in a prepared statement.
The lawsuit was filed by Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, the same commercial litigation group which challenged Google over the company's online advertising system.
Get Rich (Score:1, Insightful)
The Amazing Karnak (Score:5, Insightful)
.... says that the majority of posts will be about which side is screwing who despite no one on Slashdot having any clue about what happened at the meetings between the two companies.
Check back later for the results of the prediction.
Talk about a knee jerk reaction... (Score:5, Insightful)
If even half of their claims are founded in truth then this is a worthy lawsuit and Google acted in an 'evil' manner. I'll clue you in on something: not all lawsuits are bad. The mechanism exists for a reason.
Then again at least you admitted that you are totally uninformed on the subject since you didn't read the (short) article.
Re:The Amazing Karnak (Score:4, Insightful)
You must be new here, of course thats whats going to happen.
Some of us will get witty replies in, we'll probably get a couple "In Soviet America" jokes, a few flamers talking about privacy invasions and at least one sad, months-late attempt at a Rick Roll.
trade secrets? for moving email? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not a programmer... but It doesn't sound like something that would justify $1B in losses.
Re:Get Rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, the product is interesting if Google supposedly wanted to steal it.
Re:Talk about a knee jerk reaction... (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize you didn't read an article either, right?
Its a press-release. By the lawyers. Who are filing the lawsuit. How much of that $1B do you think they'll keep?
LimitNone = :'( (Score:5, Insightful)
I was sitting in on a product development meeting a few months back and the discussion came up on how to be viable in today's market. One of the big questions in online application entrepeneuring is: How can we remain viable against companies like Google?.. Companies like Google that can cook up the same product with all the same features in a fraction of the time. It seems that if LimitNone had applied some common sense to its product lines, it wouldn't run into the problem of oh, say, Google extending the functionality of one of its already existing applications. Whoops.
Trade secrets? What trade secrets? Google can't write a migration suite for its own email service? Geeze.
This is ust another case of litigation over innovation. I mean, I'm no IP law expert or anything, but a client migration tool? This could have easily have been some kind of open source project..who would LimitNone have sued then?
Absolutely not. (Score:2, Insightful)
$1B is a ridiculous amount of money for this lawsuit, but even at $10M, a successful suit would bring more lawsuits out of the woodwork.
If it were only $10 million, Google would just take it out of their toilet paper and soft drink budget and forget about it and it would be business as usual: $10 million is nothing to a big monster mega-corp and it doesn't get any headlines like a BILLION DOLLAR award does. In other words, it only cost $10 million, shit! Let's do it again. Paying off a $10 million lawsuit is much cheaper than developing, marketing, researching it ourselves!
With a billion dollar penalty, it gets them thinking that maybe they shouldn't continue on this path.
Re:The Amazing Karnak (Score:3, Insightful)
Two words, only smucks sue for billions when their product is worth thousands. They might have legitimate claims, but a billion dollars? Come on, these guys are just looking for easy money.
Re:Get Rich (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's a press release, which is why I said "if it's even partially true", which it may not be.
As for what Google gets out of it, if they want people to use a converter obviously giving it away for free will result in a far higher adoption rate. They may also have wanted to add it as a free feature of their Premium service to make that service more attractive to potential customers.
The whole thing could be frivolous, but if the facts are as stated in the article (press release), then it's a sleazy thing for Google to do.
Evil? (Score:1, Insightful)
So re-writing a little utility that someone is over-charging for ($29 for a one-time use tool that I don't really need?!), then giving it away for free is evil? Since when?
Stealing the look and feel, and functionality of the product is evil? So the gimp is evil too then, cause that arguably provides the same look, feel and functionality as photoshop...?
What about half the other FOSS that was made as an alternative to over-priced commercial software?
And do you honestly think that this company could have made a billion dollars in profits from this utility? I don't.
I DO think it was a bit sketchy that google worked along side them, or made them a "partner" and then reneged, but I don't think that warrants the amount of negative spin that this is getting.
What a half-assed press release (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Get Rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Sleazy? Maybe. That depends on the he-said she-said details of the "I promise I won't" allegations. The only thing that matters is in the third to last paragraph of the press release:
Microsoft proved you can't steal look and feel (from Apple, anyway). Stealing functionality sounds like reverse engineering to me.I think it comes down to a quote from Richard Marx:
Re:Get Rich (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you kidding me? (Score:2, Insightful)
Suing someone else for your own stupid mistakes seems really... well, stupid. But I guess that's the name of the game these days.
Sounds like Google made their product successful (Score:2, Insightful)
As with everyone else here, I have no idea what actually went on in the meetings between Google and this company. However, their lawyers description of events goes something like this:
- Google launches service
- Google notices small company's product complements service
- Google aggressively promotes company's product
- Google starts providing similar product as part of service
It sounds to me like this is a "sour grapes" lawsuit. The company likely benefited tremendously from Google's promotion of it's product, and was probably expecting Google to simply buy them out and integrate the product. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Google developed an in-house solution, making their product redundant.
To put in traditional terms, if I ran a car company, and I promoted a certain brand of GPS in my dealerships, could that GPS company sue me once I started to integrate GPS systems into my vehicles?
Now, there may be many things we don't know, but when the plaintiffs lawyer makes things sound like this, it doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the merit of this lawsuit.
Re:You've got a little evil there on your mouth... (Score:3, Insightful)
KD&W are not suing Google.
LimitNone is suing Google, and have retained KD&W as counsel.
I understand that many slashdotters (and people in general) have a distrust/dislike/hatred of lawyers, but is an important distinction to make.
KD&W was counsel for the other lawsuit mentioned in the summary, but they did not in fact sue Google. KD&W is used in a lot of IP/trade secret cases because they are good at it, particularly with respect to software. They have knowledge and they have experience.
Not that I'm defending lawyers in general here (forgot to wear my asbestos undergarments today), but when I use a paring knife to stab someone, do you get mad at the knife or do you get mad at me?
Re:I Love Lawyers! (Score:4, Insightful)
They contribute so much to our free economy!
When I got divorced, I was damned glad I had a good lwayer. When I subsequently filed bankrupcy, again I was glad I had a good lawyer.
When my then-wife ("Evil-X" for those of you who have seen the Paxil Diaries) was hit by a city truck that ran a red light, well, her lawyer sucked but the medical bills got paid. I was glad she hired the same guy for the divorce.
When your incompetent doctor who has lost his license in seven states (but there's no way for you to know that) leaves a sponge in your gut, you are going to need a good lawyer.
I guess your idea of a "free economy" is allowing me to steal from your store.
If you have injury and disease, you're going to need doctors. If you have computers, you are going to need programers. If you are going to have engines, you are going to need engineers. If you are going to have laws, you are going to need lawyers.
BTW, IANAL.
Re:Get Rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, since LimitNone's own website says that they are "...a leading provider of applications that leverage the revolutionary iPhone and other mobile devices to deliver communication solutions and GPS location-based services to mobile workers." this seems to be a bit of a failed business agreement rather than a stolen core of their business plan. Is it kind of sleazy to steal somebodies idea and make it better? Perhaps, but it depends on a lot of other factors. The talks sounded like they started over a year ago. That's a long time on the internet - maybe Google needed it done now. And conversion software isn't exactly a "novel" idea.
They may be truly wronged, but my money is on the likelihood that they put in the order for the new yacht and private plane before they had shipping product and paying customers and now they're figuring to get the phantom money they might have had by fishing with expensive lawyers.
Re:Get Rich (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not free. It comes with targetted adds and gets you hooked onto other google services that also come with targetted adds.
Plus, they get to undercut and destroy their competitors on the cheap (spend $200,000 now), since they don't need another potential Youtube situation (pay $3,000,000,000 to buy out a competitor later). Nipping competition in the butt is where it's at.
Google Reality Check (Score:3, Insightful)
Making money for their stockholders.
Despite all the happy horse hockey about "Do no evil", Google needed to amend it's mission statement once it became a publicly trade company to "We do less evil than everyone else"
Google is going to do what is best in their corporate interest. Surprised? Don't be. It's business
"Don't be evil" (Score:4, Insightful)
When in reality it's chapter 6 of their Corporate Philosophy page, titled "You can make money without doing evil" -- outlining what kind of advertising you should use.
They aren't even talking about themselves; let alone their business model.
So why not give them some slack, everybody. They never claimed they are saints. (Although IMHO they are one of the better behaved companies out there.)
Re:Get Rich (Score:4, Insightful)
1. It does not appear to be their corporate face (they do iPhone stuff)
2. They worked with Google for a year, then things went sour (Google made their own and LimitNone has no boxed product)
3. They suing for a Billion dollars, as opposed to, say, expenses (time and materials) during the working period, likely in the high-6 to low-7 figure range.
Re:Get Rich (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless google actually stole their CODE i don't see how there's much merrit here. I mean 'new or innovative' certainly doesn't apply to the concept of importing information from one email client to another.
Furthermore, it's google API's in gmail and the interaction with them is obviously standardized same with MS and exchange APIs. So yes, your method is going to be very similar to any competition by design.
At a guess things probably went more like
'hi google we're company XYZ and working on this nifty exchange importer. Can you lend a hand since we're teh sux at programming'
'sure, here's one of our programming guru's who has some spare time that can help out'
'thanks, we're sure to make a bundle off this one!'
'err wait. we're not going to help you build a product to sell. we give away stuff here remember?'
'nooooo you must! you're google! Well we got enough out of you to farm the rest out to india and still get rich'
'that's fine, enjoy.'
When will people learn? There are basic rights granted to US citizens. the right to get rich (or even earn money) is not one of them - much less the right to guaranteed money!!!
Good Complete Products are Complicated (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Amazing Karnak (Score:2, Insightful)