Intellectual Property Law

Google Really Does Evil By Asking for Non-Competes

By Cynthia Brumfield

Although a bit off-topic, Valleywag reports that Google forced recently acquired DoubleClick employees to sign non-compete agreements...a week before the search engine giant fired them. Many of the commenters to this post noted that the non-competes are likely unenforceable, particularly in California where they are generally illegal, and suggested that Google should have used its own search engine to find this out.

Based on my own past somewhat comparable experience, I've done a lot of research on why companies, particularly big, rich companies, demand non-compete agreements and I would wager a lot of money that Google's lawyers knew very well that few judges would ever enforce those non-compete clauses. Google is banking on the mere threat of litigation over those covenants to stifle competition. That's precisely what makes Google's action particularly evil.

It's safe to say that few, if any, of DoubleClick's fired employees can afford to battle Google in court if Google were to file a complaint against those employees for violating their non-compete agreements. And given that most of the fired employees were in New York, where non-competes are legal although still dubiously viewed, Google's $1,000-per-hour attorneys could easily chew up any fired employee's life savings by simply filing a complaint knowing full well that the company would probably not prevail in the end. (That's assuming that the employee can even find a good attorney willing to go up against Google. Most lawyers wouldn't even take the case.)

The fired employee at that point has two choices: join the legal battle that Google has started, ending up bankrupt and still-unemployed, or forego work in his or her profession for a full year. To Google's credit, the non-compete provisions last only one year -- many big companies try to sneak in three and even five-year non-compete clauses.

So, not only did Google fire the DoubleClick employees, it behaved like a lot of big, unthinking traditional corporations. It shoved a harmful and probably unenforceable contract down the throats of those vulnerable workers who are least able to defend themselves in the hope that the threat of economic devastation would cow them into submission. That's evil.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on April 11, 2008 (boomark / email).