Not long after the announcement of Google’s Wallet initiative yesterday, PayPal retaliated with litigation against the search and advertising giant for developing the service with trade secrets based on the hiring of former PayPal employees who are also being sued in Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius. Below, PayPal’s official statement on the matter and a link to the brief.
Spending time in courtrooms is generally not our thing. We prefer to compete and innovate, serving our customers by offering the best way to pay and be paid. That’s how you really win. But sometimes the behaviors of people and competitors make legal action the only meaningful way for a company to protect one of its most valuable assets – its trade secrets.
We spend a lot of time and energy creating the things that make PayPal unique and a preferred way to pay for almost 100 million people around the world. We treat PayPal’s “secrets†seriously, and take it personally when someone else doesn’t. So we made a decision today. We filed a lawsuit against Google and two former colleagues who now work there, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius.
The suit alleges that Bedier and Tilenius appropriated trade secrets from PayPal and used them in the development of Google Wallet shortly after their respective hiring as newly installed executives for the mobile commerce division. For its part Google has stated that it will fight the litigation.
