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.
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Or they reject dozens of submissions linking to an authoritative source in favour of some bullshit regurgitation from some blog with thousands of ad spots on it.
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That's a goatse.
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You know, the bouncing around the screen trick is pretty pointless when you can just Ctrl+W the tab.
no surprise... (Score:1)
Good thing they suck at execution these days (Wave, etc)
Fuck Paypal. (Score:1, Interesting)
How many indie projects have they held ransom so far? It mystifies me why people even still use Paypal for -anything-. Skip the middleman and send a cheque, that's what the post office is for. Stop giving money to those criminal goons.
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You're forgetting that checks don't work so well for international transfers.
Re:Fuck Paypal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Checks are far, far too costly.
There's nothing stopping someone from sending you a bad check. What happens if you cash it? Your bank charges you a bounced-check fee, not them, YOU. (And yes, their bank changes them a fee too.)
Why do you think just about every retail place has stopped accepting checks now? They're inherently a bad system, and the cost of dealing with a bad check is too high.
When you're selling old shit on Ebay or Craigslist or whatever, a $30 bad-check charge will eat up your profits for several items, not just that one. It just isn't worth it.
On top of that, it's too slow. It takes several days for stuff to arrive in the mail, but you also don't know how prompt the buyer is in paying for his shit; some of them sit on it for days before paying. Then you have to wait 10 days for the check to clear before you can send their stuff. Meanwhile, they're bitching because it's taking 3 weeks for them to get their item. And what if something goes wrong? What if the buyer didn't pay at all? This is very, very common on Ebay for some reason: I'd guess that fully 5% of buyers never pay for their items. This number isn't pulled out of my ass, it's what happened to me when I sold all my old Transformers on Ebay a few months ago. With Paypal-only payments, you file an unpaid item dispute, and if payment doesn't show up on Paypal in 1 day, then you re-list and void the old transaction. With checks and the USPS, you have to wait a week or two.
Sending a check would be fine if the vast majority (like 99.99%) of buyers were honest, but they're not.
Re:Fuck Paypal. (Score:4, Insightful)
The dishonesty issues are better dealt with by mechanisms like, say, jail. All you people who make sure schools can't teach morality -- it's on you @@sholes. Not my fault you've moved society from "don't do wrong" to "don't get caught". Use the wire fraud system when someone writes you a bad one. It would only take a few more doing this to make even the more ignorant criminals wake up.
I like having the records of what I spend -- it's helped me stay rich once I got there by seeing where the money goes. Yeah, you can do that other ways, but the bank is a nice paper pusher and cheaper than one I'd hire.
Ever heard of a business account, you know, like you have to have if you're a legit business, rather than a freeloader avoiding taxes and regulations? They clear checks right now, and I mean right now -- and I get a phone call immediately if a deposited check doesn't fly. Maybe you're just too dumb to bank-shop and get a good one?
And yeah, I'm a luddite -- a weird thing for an ex dev and current physicist. I've had all the other payment options, and 100% of them have been hacked more than once, till I just gave up on them. But at the small town bank, if something goes wrong, I can just offer to take my business across the street. And, so far, 100% of the time -- if I even feel the need to say that -- it's enough and "nothing ever happened, please have a nice day and keep your business with us".
Like paper ballots, it's a lot harder to cheat this system, you're not being very smart to call for ditching it. So you got hosed. Karma -- or sloth. Takes one or the other.
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You're kidding, right? A business account for selling a few old things on Ebay once in a blue moon? WTF is wrong with you?
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You're lucky, and I don't even know which continent or country you're in.
The last time I wrote a cheque was ... I'm not sure - some time in the early 1990s? I haven't seen a chequebook of mine since the last time I was clearing out the old box of bank statements from about then, and I think I took the chequebook back to the bank for them to destroy then. (I can't remember if they accepted them.)
As for a retailer that would acc
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Sounds like a flaw in your banking system. Ours would never allow you to withdraw money from an account without being the authorised owner or a signatory to the account.
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Yep, it's a pretty big flaw. It's called ACH. Unfortunately, we Americans don't have the more advanced banks the Europeans have, which is precisely why we have Paypal in the first place. I've heard that in Europe, you can just transfer money directly from your account to someone else's. We can't do that here (well, we can, it's called a "wire transfer", takes several days (yes, days), and costs $35 (!)).
With a banking system like this, it should be little wonder why we just had a financial meltdown caus
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Bzzzzz.
ACH's require authorization. That's exactly why there exists ACH authorization forms. Wow, that was tough.
An ACH transfer without authorization puts the banks liable.
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I'm in New Zealand, a tiny couple of islands just north of Antarctica, and we can transfer money like that (overnight, no cost - if to an account within the same bank, it's instant).
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NZ and Australia are pretty much European countries, except that they're not physically in Europe. They're advanced, first-world industrialized nations, populated by ex-Europeans, and they speak a European language (though with a funny accent).
So it's no surprise they have more advanced banking that we in the backwards USA have.
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Is that you, Grandpa?
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Yeah, now get off his lawn you young whippersnapper!
Dear Paypal... (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior Art... Cellphone-based mobile payment options have been available in Japan, India, even Kenya for years... some of these services have been available since before PayPal existed. And if that isn't enough of a prior art for a portable mobile payment system using an electronic network, I have an Interac card and a Visa I'd like to show them... the Interac network has existed since before the Internet (as it is today) existed, ditto Visa's electronic transaction network.
It is basic electronic security... beyond that, all you need is a unique user ID and a way to bill that user ID back to the customer. Giving somebody a unique account number isn't exactly a trade secret: banks have been doing that for as long as banks have existed. Putting a password/PIN on that isn't exactly a trade secret: that's been done in computer science for almost as long as computers have existed. How is any of what they're doing a trade secret?
Re:Dear Paypal... (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Google because of their search engine, I use their gmail because it is efficient for personal things and their anti spam is very good.
I use the front page to pull feeds from other sites and get a quick glance at things.
I use Android based phones because I like their business model.
But if Google ever does me wrong, I will find alternatives.
Businesses really dont have to try this hard to smear Google, eventually they will buckle under their own weight or because some idiot will get into a position they shouldnt be in and make a decision that harms the consumer. I know this is an inevitability, so do most smart consumers. Let it go companies, right now you just look petty.
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Its not about using "ideas". Its about stealing specific, actual information that another company kept secret that is of material value to their business.
Trade secrets are not some new or novel thing; let's say I come up with a recipe for this great and awesome sauce that makes everything taste wonderful. Obviously, I want to keep that secret. So I make my employees sign a NDA on the recipe, and I go out of my way to not reveal exactly what is in it and the process of mixing that I go through.
If you analyze
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I think that is unreasonable. Trying to keep something a secret is risky by definition. It makes perfect sense for a competing company to try to compete by duplicating their competitor's product. While it may be unethical, that doesn't mean it should be illegal. I think their recourse should be only to sue the employee with whom they had a contractual agreement. If they had no such agreement with a competing company, I say "tough cheese.". That's business. Try harder to keep your secrets or diversify so yo
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"Real" business, where its okay to bribe someone into breaking a NDA. "Real" business where its okay to go tap someones phone. "Real" business where you can break someones knees if they're getting in on your turf.
Your idea of "real business" has to be run by sociopaths -- worse then the current ones already are.
There's nothing wrong with duplicating a competitors product: that's good business. That's NOT theft of trade secrets: theft of trade secrets is inducing someone into breaking their agreement to keep
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I didn't condone any of those things. However, while bribes are immoral, in the private sector they ought to be legal.
Keeping secrets is risky business, and there should be no legal protection for doing so. Patents and copyrights are bad enough.
Ideas don't belong to anyone, they belong to everyone.
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Agreed. I don't understand the grandparent's argument that I'm morally any worse because I got one of my competitors employees to squeal.
If the cops do it to a suspect, and the information is about a murder, its cool, but if I do it in my business it's not? Why should I be worried about the other guy's consequences? The cops don't worry about the squealer getting shot a block away from the police station after he squeals, do they?
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Yes. You have hit the nail on the head. Makes me want to build a time machine and go back to the stone age and "invent" a wheel. Oh, wait...doing that would "infringe" on someone's imaginary "property" probably.
The way things are going, the rate of progress is going to slow down instead of continuing to increase. The future is going to laugh at us in bewilderment--the past already is.
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AFAIC they can get as evil as they want to other companies. When they get evil to users like some other companies *coughsonycough* then I'm done with them. I could give a rat's ass what one big government-owning corporation does to another.
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They should be allowed to bitch and moan. But they shouldn't be allowed to sue. In the job market today, employees are all far too undervalued with the exception of the C-level which are typically over-valued. (Yeah, I know, I'm giving away my blue-collar nature.) Fact is, if Paypal valued their employees well enough, they couldn't be coaxed into jumping ship for another company. They leave for one reason only -- "better job." And "better job" doesn't always mean more money. It could mean free basket
Re:Dear Paypal...Missing the point on Goog (Score:2)
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The fact that a successful company has a slogan "do no evil" makes me think that something is seriously wrong with consumer protection.
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Prior art doesn't apply in this case. Please understand what you're talking about before spewing that nonsense. Paypal's complaint is that Google hired one of their existing employees who had prior knowledge of upcoming paypal business strategies, contracts, and people they would approach for the service. The former paypal employee then used Paypal's trade secrets and internal business policies and code to set up a competing service and then to contact the companies and offer the Google Wallet service inste
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Prior art only applies to patents, not trade secrets. They are pretty exactly opposite sides of the IP landscape. There could be some algorithms behind the scenes or in any other number of secret locations that would still be secret.
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Prior art only applies to patents, not trade secrets. They are pretty exactly opposite sides of the IP landscape. There could be some algorithms behind the scenes or in any other number of secret locations that would still be secret.
That's true, the specific phrase "prior art" is normally only used when dealing with patents, but you also can't claim something as a trade secret if it's already publicly known. I'm curious about what Paypal is claiming as secret, since I'm sure Google has plenty of people capable of developing this kind of system without stealing any secrets from Paypal (whom I didn't even know had a mobile payment system).
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Agreed...Paypal can DIAF. I had heard horror stories but ignored them and continued to use them for years, mainly to pay for stuff but once in a while to sell on ebay. About a month ago I had been cleaning my basement and ran across some collectibles that I had no use for but were worth a decent amount so I listed them....have no negative feedback at all, have never had a payment dispute and have been a member for 9 years, a few days before 3k worth of auctions are about to close I get a notice from paypa
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You do realise PayPal is owned by eBay right? So eBay is actually creating it's own protection racket via a subsidiary.
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You had the option of going with a standard merchant account as well. You just have to offer Paypal with eBay.
Oh wait, most merchant accounts screw with you worse than Paypal - demanding minimum transaction amounts (you must do $1K+ per month, or more), arbitrary holds (21 days? Hah. Some can hold for 90+ days), and all sorts of other crap.
Trust me, if you want to accept random amounts of money from people, your only option is Paypal. Unless you're a business, you can't accept credit cards at all otherwise.
There are alternatives, just not in the USA (Score:2)
There are alternatives, just not in the USA.
There's Yandex.Money and WebMoney in Russia (and xUSSR in general), which allow to do anonymous transactions. If I want to transfer money to somebody I just need to know their 'wallet ID'. I can even use payment terminals (like iBox: http://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/1848145/ibox-terminal.html [pond5.com] which are everywhere ) and pay with cash completely anonymously. Fees are reasonable - around 1% for small transactions.
If I want to use something more official then there
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... uhh, Paypal isn't suing them for patent infringement. "Prior art" has nothing to do with it.
They're suing them for stealing trade secrets -- trade secrets can be anything confidential that a business uses in, well, doing business. We have no idea what actual trade secrets they are alleging Google stole: that's almost certainly going to be sealed... A trade secret is just information that's important to a business that they attempt to keep secret. It could be a list of businesses who were ready to partne
Wrong... (Score:1)
The employees that left simply didn't want to give Paypal their bank account number....
F paypal.
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.
And so (Score:2)
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 fo
Money money money (Score:1)
Title is bullshit (Score:2)
The title is bullshit. Ebay is not suing because Google is using their trade secrets. As far as I know, any trade secret you can reverse engineer legitimately is fair game. Ebay is suing because Google grabbed two of ebay's key personnel and ebay has information that these key personnel have revealed ebay's secrets to Google and Google is using this illicitly obtained information - despite both non-compete and non-disclosure clauses.
This way, the suit actually makes sense instead of being a WTF moment.
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Non-competes are illegal in CA, so that can't be the basis of their suit (or at least not a good one).
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"Ebay is suing because Google grabbed two of ebay's key personnel and ebay has information that these key personnel have revealed ebay's secrets to Google and Google is using this illicitly obtained information - despite both non-compete and non-disclosure clauses."
Since Google doesn't have read that NDA nor signed it themselves nor can they identify what knowledge an employee has is illicit or not, how can this be Google's fault?
Anyway, if the NDA has a fine defined for a violation, they'll just pay it.
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The issue is not what Google knows or does not know. The issue is that Ebay can identify what they know to be their plans implemented at Google, immediately after two of Ebay's personnel move to Google.
Non disclosures and the like (in the US as I know them at least) do not codify what will happen to you if you break them. They simply restrict what you may do. If you break one after signing it, you are violating contract law, plain and simple. The remedy is bringing suit in civil court.
Google has the poc
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Since Google doesn't have read that NDA nor signed it themselves nor can they identify what knowledge an employee has is illicit or not, how can this be Google's fault?
Inducing someone to commit a crime is in itself a crime (and the same for civil violations). This will likely be the basis of their argument.
No Patent (Score:1)
But it's a Secret, they whine in return. (def. secret: Something that you tell one person at a time.)
And what if someone else comes up with your "secret" independently? Can you sue them for (re)discovering your Trade Secret?
The only reason for Trade Secrets is, unlike patents, they never run out.
eBay essentially says that they own your mind even after you leave their overly restrictive, underpaid, jo
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Actually, the whole point of trade secrets is that they don't run out, and they don't require publishing. However, unlike patents the catch is that if someone else independently creates it, they do not infringe upon it and you have no basis to file suit. Trade secrets are protected in the same way as patents, other than that one specific case.
shotgun! (Score:1)
Paypal are upset because Google touched the market first and said "Shotgun!".
Firefox playing up. (Score:2, Interesting)
When I opened this article, it said this is a scam site.
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I reported it as not a scam site. I think it's because of the word paypal in the url bar.
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Chrome is doing it too(they use the same db)
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So Wallet is going to suck horrendously too? (Score:1)
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Same here!
Why aren't they suing the employees? (Score:2)
It's about the customer list. (Score:2)
This isn't about the technology. It's about Google hiring a PayPal marketing guy who had contacts with the retailers PayPal was going to sign up.
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That would actually seem to make some sense.
Contact information belongs to the employer. It's entered on company computers on company time.
Even copying it into your own paper notebook means you were using company time to do so, which is uncool regardless of the legality.
Too many cooks. (Score:2)
PayPal Accuses Google of Poaching Mobile Payment Trade Secrets, Personnel
So Paypal doesn't want Google lightly cooking their eggs...or personnel?
Call the waambulance. (Score:2)
"I thought of it first! Mommy! Make him stop!"
Pathetic and hypocritical.
Wallet concept not new (Score:1)
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Goatse link, not that this is a surprise.