PayPal Accuses Google of Poaching Mobile Payment Trade Secrets, Personnel 103
jhernik writes with a selection from eWeek Europe's short story on a snag facing Google's new mobile payment system: "PayPal, eBay's payment service, has sued Google over its new Google Wallet service, accusing the search engine of poaching trade secrets for use in its mobile payment service. The suit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court just hours after Google unveiled its Wallet payments sheme, alleges that two key executives who created the near-field communication (NFC) service used company secrets about mobile payments to fashion its own service."
Re:Tuesday called, it wants its story back (Score:4, Informative)
Why don't you submit it yourself then if you wanted it on /. immediately ? Slashdot is almost entirely user submissions. I don't care how long ago this was, I just like the snarky and often insightful or informative comments.
Blurb confusing. (Score:4, Informative)
Take note that they are not suing over NFC itself. After reading the blurb my first reaction was "they should of freaking patented it". This seems to be about business info instead.
It's probably not about patents (Score:2, Informative)
Per Engadget [engadget.com], this is Paypal upset that their go-to guy who was negotiating with Google for a deal that would probably have been involved in the Wallet backend jumped ship to Google and helped launch Wallet instead. If the allegations are true, Osama Bedier was working both sides-- while pretending to work for Paypal to negotiate a business deal with Google, he was talking to Google about a potentially lucrative job.
(If Paypal are also suing over patents, they're insane-- NFC payments have been available for quite a while now. If there's anything they should learn from Oracle v. Google, it's that you don't want to dump a bunch of extra charges on the bench of an already overworked judge.)
Re:Dear Paypal... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not saying Google is doing anything wrong, but let's *assume* that Google is doing shady things (like "stealing trade secrets" as alleged by Paypal) to harm their competitors, shouldn't those competitors be allowed to bitch and moan too?
It doesn't always have to be you (or the customer) who's harmed before they can be rightfully accused of any wrongdoing.