Google faces lawsuit over stolen secrets
Written by Sue Gee   
Monday, 30 May 2011

Within hours of the unveiling of Wallet, Google's new mobile payments system a lawsuit was filed against Google and two of its employees.

The lawsuit has been filed by eBay and its subsiduary company PayPal against Stephanie Tilenius and Osama Bedier in addition to Google and doesn't appear to be just about the fact that Google's Wallet uses similar algorithms to PayPal's system.

Instead the grounds for PayPal's complaint centers around the behavior of its two former senior executives who were recruited from PayPal to Google at a time when PayPal was negotiating with Google to become the default payment method for Android Market purchase.

At the point at which Stephanie Tilenius (who had been SVP of North America and Global Products at eBay) moved to Google part of her resignation agreement was not to recruit other PayPal employees to Google. However, according to PayPal she recruited Osama Bedier, formerly Vice President of Platform, Mobile, and New Ventures at PayPal, who in turn recruited other of his former colleagues.

According to PayPal Bedier took with him:

"intimate knowledge of PayPal's capabilities, strategies, plans, and market intelligence"

This combined with Bedier's failure to disclose to PayPal that he was interviewing for a job at Google while acting as the senior executive representing PayPal over its Android deal seems to be the crux of the lawsuit. 

Banner


Apple's Swift Is Coming To Android
27/06/2025

Swift has long lost its position as a proprietary language, but what could Apple be thinking as it makes its move to the Android platform?



Student’s Robot Smashes 4x4 Rubik’s Cube World Record
13/06/2025

Matt Pidden, a computer science student at the University of Bristol, UK, has broken the world record for solving a 4x4 Rubik's Cube using a robot he designed, built and trained in just 15 weeks.


More News

Last Updated ( Monday, 30 May 2011 )