Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit claiming pattern of trade secrets theft
Google accused of racketeering in lawsuit claiming
pattern of trade secrets theft
By ETHAN BARON PUBLISHED: October 6, 2017 at 12:43 pm |
UPDATED: October 7, 2017 at 3:09 am
MOUNTAIN VIEW — 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.
“The real adding-insult-to-injury was Google telling him
the project had been canceled and they weren’t going forward with it when in
fact they were going full blast on it,” Attia’s lawyer Eric Buether said in an
interview Friday.
Also named as defendants are Google X founder Sebastian
Thrun and Eric “Astro” Teller, the head of Google X, who are alleged to have
negotiated with Attia over his technology.
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.”
Now Attia has added another allegation to the suit: the
Mountain View tech giant’s actions follow a pattern that makes Google guilty of
racketeering.
“It’s cheaper to steal than to develop your own
technology,” Buether said. “You can take it from somebody else and you have a
virtually unlimited budget to fight these things in court.”
Attia’s technology automates certain aspects of building
design, to save time and money and allow architects and designers to focus on
creative elements, Buether said.
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.
“Google would solicit a party to share with it highly
confidential trade secrets under a non-disclosure agreement, conduct
negotiations with the party, then terminate negotiations with the party
professing a lack of interest in the party’s technology, followed by the
unlawful use of the party’s trade secrets in its business,” Attia said in the
filing.
Six lawsuits against Google, five of them resolved in the
company’s favor because of procedural issues, reveal the pattern of
intellectual property theft, Buether alleged. The company uses non-disclosure
agreements to encourage a target to share confidential information, Buether
claimed.
“The person with that NDA feels comfortable in revealing
the details of the technology which is proprietary because they see a huge
opportunity with a company like Google,” Buether said.
In Attia’s case, Google struck an agreement with him to
use his intellectual property and patent some of it, but in spite of using it
as the basis for a new firm called Flux Factory, failed to pay him as agreed,
Buether claimed.
“It’s even worse than just using the proprietary
information — they actually then claim ownership through patent applications,”
Buether said.
Flux Factory, according to a filing by Attia, was “simply
a reconstitution of Project Genie under a different name.”
Today, Flux Factory is called Flux. Headquartered in San
Francisco, it sells building-design software and markets itself as “the first
company launched by Google X.”
Attia’s suit seeks unspecified damages and compensation.
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