PayPal Sues Google for Mobile Wallet

Fresh off its grand Mobile Wallet unveiling, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is being slapped with a lawsuit from PayPal , which claims the software giant recruited away PayPal executive Osama Bedier, bringing trade secrets with him. (See Google Taps Sprint for Tap-to-Pay.)

According to the lawsuit, filed by PayPal and parent company eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), Bedier was negotiating a deal for PayPal to handle sales of apps in Google's Android Market, but was interviewing for a job at Google at the same time.

PayPal claims it has been building a mobile payments ecosystem up for the past 10 years, and that Bedier held on to the intel from the company's interworkings when he left in January. What's more condemning are PayPal's allegations that Bedier transferred up-to-date versions of documents outlining the company's mobile payment and point-of-sale strategies to his personal computer just days before leaving the company. eBay has asked for the information back, but Bedier has repeatedly refused, the lawsuit says. "In the course of his work at Google, Bedier and Google have misappropriated PayPal trade secrets by disclosing them within Google and to major retailers," the lawsuit reads. Stephanie Tilenius, Google's VP of eCommerce, is also a former PayPal executive who eBay says helped recruit Bedier away to build Google's Near-Field Communications (NFC) platform.

Bedier, Tilenius and Google are all named as defendants in the lawsuit.

— Sarah Reedy, Senior Reporter, Light Reading Mobile

(2)  |