This in from ArsTechnica, Google is being sued over an alleged theft of the Orkut source code.

Now on the surface, the claim by AEI seems reasonable. Orkut (the man) worked at Affinity before Google. Affinity was developing social networking software. Google developed social networking software. Google named it Orkut (of all things...if you are going to steal code then don't name it after yourself...plausible deniability goes out the window there if you try to say you had nothing to do with it). According to Affinity, Orkut exhibits many of the same bugs that Affinity's software, inCircle™ has. Okay, if that is in fact true, then I feel sorry for Affinity as it is, because Orkut just plain sucks.

On to the meat of this. Here we have an area of intellectual property law that is pretty gray I think...software. Actually, everything surrounding software is suspect, Intellectual Property rights, patentability, and so on. You look at Orkut, and, if you have ever developed web software, you realize that it's nothing special. Sure, it's neat, but we're just talking web pages and databases. There's no really cool algorithms going on there, not crazy UI tricks that nobody has ever thought of, nothing of the sort. It's all standard stuff that any web programmer can do with any scripting language. As a matter of fact, it has a security flaw that, while not heinous, certainly doesn't give anyone the ammunition to say the software is all that special.

So my quesion is, how are you going to sue? Or, better put, how do you expect to win? You can't There is no proof that Orkut is using the inCircle code. Even if you did get the two sources, hold them side by side, and run them through a text comparison tool, I'm sure that, even if they had horked the code, they would have changed it significanltly enough that you could never prove definitively that it was AEI's. The propagation of similar bugs in similar software is circumstantial at best. We all tend to make the same kinds of mistakes. Code is code is code, especially code that does what Orkut/inCircle does. I'm sure these bugs of which they speak are not so distinguishable from any other bug that any of the programmers on the two projects have made throughout their careers. So I ask again, where's the proof?

The problem is that our legal system is being used in such a way now that a lawsuit is just as good as a PR staff for getting word out about your thing that you allege someone else stole, and if you go after a big company, say...Google, and said big company is...oh...I don't know...poised for a much hyped IPO pretty soon, then said company is probably willing to settle to avoid the issues that will delay the IPO and BAM! you just got yourself something better than a round of venture capital mister! Nothing spends better than found money.

And this is happening everywhere, not just software and technology, and not just company against company. Pissed off you didn't win the lotto last week? Well get off your fat ass long enough to go eat a burger at McDonald's, then hire a lawyer and see if you can win the jury lottery. Consent to a dangerous medical procedure after having all the risks disclosed, and have it not go the way you hoped? Surely the doctor is incompetent, because everyone knows the human body is rather simple and straightforward a device...so let's hit that bastard up for everything his insurance company has, put him out of business, and then sue him again when he's working at McDonald's because that's the only place they'll let him use a knife anymore. Got some run-of-the-mill, no-name software company, and pissed off because one of your guys jumped ship to join one of the most prestigious tech companies in the land? Well, he wasn't that good a programmer anyway, so he must have taken all your source code with him and put it in place there. Sue them. There is no such thing as bad press you know, and if it nets you a nice out-of-court windfall, then you can go home happy because you sir are the embodiment of the American Dream.