Google Responds to PayPal Lawsuit: “We Respect Trade Secrets”

PayPal filed suit against Google and two of its former executives yesterday, claiming that the company and employees misappropriated trade secrets and violated contracts involving recruiting agreements.

Predictably, after Google was able to take a look at the lawsuit, it fired back a response: “Silicon Valley was built on the ability of individuals to use their knowledge and expertise to seek better employment opportunities, an idea recognized by both California law and public policy. We respect trade secrets, and will defend ourselves against these claims.”

The lawsuit was filed in Santa Clara’s Superior Court, just hours after Google’s mobile payment announcement, which laid out its plans for how mobile phones will be used to pay for purchases at the register.

The two executives named in the lawsuit are Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, who directly oversee Google’s new payments initiative. Bedier, who left PayPal in January, is now Google’s VP of payments, and Tilenius, who left in late 2009, is VP of commerce.

They were both on stage yesterday in New York to help make Google’s announcement.

PayPal claims that Tilenius recruited Bedier in violation of a contractual obligation; Bedier is being accused of misappropriating trade secrets due to his intimate knowledge of PayPal’s mobile plans.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik