Architect Eli Attia spent 50 years generating what his lawsuit calls “game-changing new technology” for creating construction. Google in 2010 uncovered a deal to work with him on advertising it as software, and Attia moved with his family from New York to Palo Alto to focus on the action, code-named “Project Genie.”
The project was offered in Google’s secretive “Google X” unit for overnight “moonshots.”
But then Google and its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin “planned to squeeze Attia out of the project” and created to kill it but used Attia’s technology to “surreptitiously” spin-off Project Genie into a new corporation, according to the lawsuit.
“The real adding-insult-to-injury was Google saying him the project had been dropped and they weren’t going forward with it when in fact they were going full blast on it,” Attia’s lawyer Eric Buether said in a conference Friday.
Also named as parties are Google X founder Sebastian Thrun and Eric “Astro” Teller, the front of Google X, who is alleged to have allocated with Attia over his technology.
Google did not directly respond to a request for judgment, but a judge in the case noted last year that the firm has disputed that Attia gave Google rights to his technology “without a provision for later payment.”
Now Attia has added extra allegation to the suit: the Mountain View tech giant’s actions develop a pattern that makes Google guilty of racketeering.
“It’s reasonable to steal than to promote your own technology,” Buether said. “You can take it from notable else and you have a virtually unlimited budget to fight these things in court.”
Attia’s technology automates positive aspects of building design, to save time and money and allow engineers and designers to focus on productive elements, Buether said.
This week, a judge in Santa Clara County Superior Court allowed the addition of racketeering claims to the action originally filed in 2014.
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