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It seems the title is implying that the people suing think Google had an obligation to not be evil because that was its motto. Reading the article, the lawsuit

It seems the title is implying that the people suing think Google had an obligation to not be evil because that was its motto. Reading the article, the lawsuit is about something more reasonable: They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil". They organized a movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto, and believe they were fired for doing this organizing. Say you were hired as security. You signed a contract stating you wouldn't let anyone enter the building who doesn't have a valid employee id. One day a VP forgets his ID at home, and puts you in a tough spot. Fearing you'd be fired because you violated your contract, you deny the VP access to the building. The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired. In this case, suing the company for following the rules it made you follow seems reasonable. The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. I'm unsure it will have enough standing to succeed, but it's not entirely unreasonable.

henryfjordan 5y ago
Vagueness is to be construed against the drafter of the contract, Google in this case.
- nickff 5y ago
  I believe that only applies to contracts of adhesion (in most areas), though this contract may be one of adhesion. The presumption would probably be taken to mean that the employee couldn't be fired 'with cause' for 'being evil', but I don't know how you'd prove Google was 'being evil'. This is tantamount to accusing someone of fraud for saying that they 'were nice', but then not 'being nice'.
  - henryfjordan 5y ago
    I don't think it applies strictly to contracts of adhesion, just contracts where a single party was the drafter of the bad term. This case will not hinge on what the definition of "evil" is, but on whether "don't be evil" was a real term of the contract or some errata in the employee handbook. And even then, the complaint isn't "Google was evil" but rather "Google's handbook said to point out evil when I see it and they fired me for it".
- xyproto 5y ago
  That's a clever rule. Does most justice systems in the world have this?
  - henryfjordan 5y ago
    The US would have most likely inherited that rule from England. I'd imagine there's a form of that rule in most legal systems though. see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem
skynetv2 5y ago
There is no case here. There is no specificity to "Don't be evil" as its very subjective.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  Might Google settle anyway, just to avoid arguing in court, in front of the public, that "don't be evil" never meant anything in the first place?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_9hey 5y ago
This lawsuit won’t go anywhere. “Don’t be evil” is not a contract, and if it was, they’ll have to convince the court that their definition of evil is the one true definition. This is really just a publicity stunt to get Google to settle to prevent PR damages. It’s highly unlikely that they have any incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing as defined by law.
- btown 5y ago
  I'm not sure this is true. I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems that in e.g. https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/first-circuit/malice-requires-an-evil-purpose-not-just-an-improper-motive/ https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/first-circuit/malice-requ... courts may consider the notion of "evil" as even more concrete and fundamental than the definition of "malice." Sure, settlement may be the likely outcome, but there's not a zero chance of success on the merits.
karaterobot 5y ago
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. I'm unsure it will have enough standing to succeed, but it's not entirely unreasonable. As will be made obvious by the following comment, I am not a lawyer. But, I always think of the modern judicial system as staying away from saying some particular action is "evil" in the moral sense, rather than just illegal, or even ethically wrong in some cases. I think it would really be something if the court admitted a specific definition of evil for the purposes of deciding on this case. In my view of the world, that kind of thing would need a philosophical or theological basis, which you'd think would then be enshrined, to some extent, in precedent. I doubt anything like that would actually happen in this case, but it would sure be weird if it did.
daenz 5y ago
What does "be" mean? Does it mean "act" or does it mean "exist"? Can a person do something evil without "being" evil? Can you be evil without doing anything evil (yet)? These are questions for philosophers to contemplate, not angry employees who were fired (in their eyes) unjustly. To me, it's a cash grab masquerading as something more virtuous. They better hope they get a big payout, enough to last them for a long time, because regardless they will be branded as troublemakers who aren't worth the risk of employing.
- rp1 5y ago
  Prior to this lawsuit, what did you take the old Google motto to mean? Personally, I took it to mean don’t commit evil acts [as a company]. Obviously you can pick it apart now, but it wasn’t derided as some ambiguous concept prior to this lawsuit.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    > it wasn’t derided as some ambiguous concept prior to this lawsuit. It was routinely criticized for exactly that by many google critics online.
    - mcphage 5y ago
      It was criticized for that by Google critics—but Google did put it in their contracts, so they must have meant something more specific by it.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. They're going to have an extremely uphill battle to fight if this is the basis of their legal argument. No reasonable person could understand the phrase, "Don't Be Evil," to mean, "Don't do things that I personally consider evil." For example, I very much doubt that a court is going to find that Customs and Border Protection is "evil," and thus any actions the plaintiffs took against Google's dealings with CBP were contractually mandated by the employment agreement. To the extent that this is a headache for Google at all, it will serve as a great example as to why legalese and corporate-speak is so common in the U.S. Google tried to have a motto that, while legally ambiguous, expressed a sentiment about how they wanted to treat their users and act in the marketplace. There will be different opinions about how well Google lives up to the motto, but certainly at the time it was coined, that was the idea behind it. And now they're getting sued, essentially frivolously, over the language. If it causes them a problem, it's a lesson to other companies: avoid mottos that are subject to creative and motivated interpretation during litigation. Or to put it another way, don't have mottos.
- mpd 5y ago
  > No reasonable person could understand the phrase, "Don't Be Evil," to mean, "Don't do things that I personally consider evil." TBH, I think almost everyone treats the former statement, as meaning the latter. Did you mistype here? Maybe there's even something different about using "evil" here, specifically. Would another word have a different outcome?
  - bananabreakfast 5y ago
    No one treats it that way. A reasonable person should understand it not as requesting to make subjective personal judgments but rather as what it clearly was meant as: "Don't be Microsoft"
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mpd 5y ago
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
No, the problem is it’s flatly ridiculous to claim an employee code of conduct binds the company. What in the hell.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  For public companies, this can be considered securities fraud - in the Matt Levine sense.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > No, the problem is it’s flatly ridiculous to claim an employee code of conduct binds the company Not only is it not ridiculous, but that employment policies like CoC’s generally constitute binding contracts (which, inherently, bind both parties) is fairly well established in employment law.
- teh_infallible 5y ago
  I think the idea is that if the employee is bound to the code of conduct, the company shouldn’t be able to force the employee to act in a way that violates it.
benatkin 5y ago
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. That should be Google's problem. It would have been better if they had never stated that intention. They used it to ingratiate themselves to Mozilla and Linux users.
umvi 5y ago
> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. Exactly, depending on your political viewpoint, "Don't Be Evil" could mean some/all of the following: - Not doing business with China - Not doing business with ICE - Not doing business with any government - Not doing business with any other business that has currently-employed "evil" (politically incorrect) employees - Not building ad-tech - Not building free products where the monetization model involves user tracking - Not hiring enough minorities - Not firing "evil" employees (employees who are politically incorrect, who voted for X evil candidate, who don't fall in line with "good" thought/speech, etc)
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  It could even mean the opposite of each of these, depending on your perspective. - Maybe it's evil to do business in China, because it requires you to censor search results. - Or maybe it's evil not to, because you deprive Chinese people of an important utility, and you don't actually make them better off in any other way. - Maybe doing business with ICE is evil, because kids in cages. - Or maybe avoiding ICE is evil, because it's unpatriotic or undemocratic! Every single one of these actions or inactions could be construed to be evil depending upon one's personal values, moral code, or even one's understanding of various contested facts involved in the decision-making!
- q1w2 5y ago
  The point of a motto like this is to provide guidance when there's no specific company guidance. When the company publicly says they will do business with China, the vague motto doesn't allow you to refuse to do you job.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    The vague motto is not the issue; the detailed elucidation of the meaning in the code of content and the positive direction in the CoC (alleged to be, and this is consistent with the legal treatment of similar signed policy documents in employment law, a binding contract) to raise issues when either individual googlers at any level or the company as a whole seemed to be violating the policy as elucidated in that document are the issues. The specific direction to raise issues if the company as a whole appeared to be in violation cannot be reconciled with the idea that it did not apply to announced official company actions. And no one refused to do their job. The question is whether the things they were fired for doing were additional to, outside of, and inconsistent with their job or part of their job as specified in a binding contract with their employer.
protomyth 5y ago
They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil". The employee code of conduct, that they were made to sign as a condition of employment has the directive "Don't Be Evil" in it? Did Google legal review that document? Although often made fun of, there is a reason IBM legal required a license change in JSLint to get out of its "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license clause. Heck, Google Code wouldn't host JSMin-PHP because of that clause ( https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code ).
dragonwriter 5y ago
> They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil" No, the more key part is: “[...] everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. [...] And if you have a question or ever think that one of your fellow Googlers or the company as a whole may be falling short of our commitment, don’t be silent.” There legal allegation is not that the company action was evil. It’s that it was reasonably within the realm of subjectively questionable conduct that the company had, in a binding contract with employees, demanded to be alerted to when employees had concerns, and that therefore retaliating against employees for their internal action consistent with that binding agreement is illegal.
AlbertCory 5y ago
Wrong on every count. > "movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto" is factually wrong, and that's what my post demonstrated. They started a movement that had nothing to do with what "don't be evil" meant. It didn't mean "justice for immigrants." > "The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired" Also bogus. This sort of thing did happen, and the security guards were celebrated, not fired. Any VP who tried this would himself (or herself) get fired. > "The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague" Wrong. Contract terms are construed by the law. Since Google wrote the contract, their interpretation tends to govern.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  > Since Google wrote the contract, their interpretation tends to govern. Contra proferentem (Latin: "against [the] offeror"), also known as "interpretation against the draftsman", is a doctrine of contractual interpretation providing that, where a promise, agreement or term is ambiguous, the preferred meaning should be the one that works against the interests of the party who provided the wording. Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem Note that CA has adopted this. I don’t think “don’t be evil” was part of the employment contract, but if it was, Google would likely wish it weren’t in this case.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    I'm a patent guy, not a lawyer, so this is well outside my zone of competence. A real lawyer could tell us how often Contra proferentem is used in practice, and whether it might apply here.
skeeter2020 5y ago
If I worked for Nike could I use "Just Do It" to justify any lapse in judgement? Promote conspiracy theories because Apple tells me to "Think Different"? Be a giant prick at work because EA tells me to "Challenge everything"? Seek damages because "Red Bull gives you wings" didn't literally deliver? Ignore Covid public health protocols because my employer KFC states "It’s finger-lickin’ good"? This is pretty thin material, specially because they were fired after repeated correction that clarified what they were doing was out of sync with any generic motto.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  Were any of those other corporate mottos in the code of conducts they made employees sign?
kodah 5y ago
What work was Google doing for CBP? I didn't see that mentioned.
butMyside 5y ago
The vagueness could be used against Google, but of course it won’t because semantic tradition. What’s the point of human language again? Except for trivial human tasks it’s easily exploited.
joshspankit 5y ago
I wish we had more ability to public remove the bias in titles through effort like this. This reply is on-point, addresses my immediate suspicion, counters an (assumably intentional) attempt to spread a negative narrative, and is excellently reasoned.

henryfjordan 5y ago

Vagueness is to be construed against the drafter of the contract, Google in this case.

nickff 5y ago
I believe that only applies to contracts of adhesion (in most areas), though this contract may be one of adhesion. The presumption would probably be taken to mean that the employee couldn't be fired 'with cause' for 'being evil', but I don't know how you'd prove Google was 'being evil'. This is tantamount to accusing someone of fraud for saying that they 'were nice', but then not 'being nice'.
- henryfjordan 5y ago
  I don't think it applies strictly to contracts of adhesion, just contracts where a single party was the drafter of the bad term. This case will not hinge on what the definition of "evil" is, but on whether "don't be evil" was a real term of the contract or some errata in the employee handbook. And even then, the complaint isn't "Google was evil" but rather "Google's handbook said to point out evil when I see it and they fired me for it".
xyproto 5y ago
That's a clever rule. Does most justice systems in the world have this?
- henryfjordan 5y ago
  The US would have most likely inherited that rule from England. I'd imagine there's a form of that rule in most legal systems though. see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem

skynetv2 5y ago

There is no case here. There is no specificity to "Don't be evil" as its very subjective.

Eelongate 5y ago
Might Google settle anyway, just to avoid arguing in court, in front of the public, that "don't be evil" never meant anything in the first place?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

_9hey 5y ago

This lawsuit won’t go anywhere. “Don’t be evil” is not a contract, and if it was, they’ll have to convince the court that their definition of evil is the one true definition. This is really just a publicity stunt to get Google to settle to prevent PR damages. It’s highly unlikely that they have any incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing as defined by law.

btown 5y ago
I'm not sure this is true. I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems that in e.g. https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/first-circuit/malice-requires-an-evil-purpose-not-just-an-improper-motive/ https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/first-circuit/malice-requ... courts may consider the notion of "evil" as even more concrete and fundamental than the definition of "malice." Sure, settlement may be the likely outcome, but there's not a zero chance of success on the merits.

karaterobot 5y ago

> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. I'm unsure it will have enough standing to succeed, but it's not entirely unreasonable. As will be made obvious by the following comment, I am not a lawyer. But, I always think of the modern judicial system as staying away from saying some particular action is "evil" in the moral sense, rather than just illegal, or even ethically wrong in some cases. I think it would really be something if the court admitted a specific definition of evil for the purposes of deciding on this case. In my view of the world, that kind of thing would need a philosophical or theological basis, which you'd think would then be enshrined, to some extent, in precedent. I doubt anything like that would actually happen in this case, but it would sure be weird if it did.

daenz 5y ago

What does "be" mean? Does it mean "act" or does it mean "exist"? Can a person do something evil without "being" evil? Can you be evil without doing anything evil (yet)? These are questions for philosophers to contemplate, not angry employees who were fired (in their eyes) unjustly. To me, it's a cash grab masquerading as something more virtuous. They better hope they get a big payout, enough to last them for a long time, because regardless they will be branded as troublemakers who aren't worth the risk of employing.

rp1 5y ago
Prior to this lawsuit, what did you take the old Google motto to mean? Personally, I took it to mean don’t commit evil acts [as a company]. Obviously you can pick it apart now, but it wasn’t derided as some ambiguous concept prior to this lawsuit.
- Eelongate 5y ago
  > it wasn’t derided as some ambiguous concept prior to this lawsuit. It was routinely criticized for exactly that by many google critics online.
  - mcphage 5y ago
    It was criticized for that by Google critics—but Google did put it in their contracts, so they must have meant something more specific by it.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. They're going to have an extremely uphill battle to fight if this is the basis of their legal argument. No reasonable person could understand the phrase, "Don't Be Evil," to mean, "Don't do things that I personally consider evil." For example, I very much doubt that a court is going to find that Customs and Border Protection is "evil," and thus any actions the plaintiffs took against Google's dealings with CBP were contractually mandated by the employment agreement. To the extent that this is a headache for Google at all, it will serve as a great example as to why legalese and corporate-speak is so common in the U.S. Google tried to have a motto that, while legally ambiguous, expressed a sentiment about how they wanted to treat their users and act in the marketplace. There will be different opinions about how well Google lives up to the motto, but certainly at the time it was coined, that was the idea behind it. And now they're getting sued, essentially frivolously, over the language. If it causes them a problem, it's a lesson to other companies: avoid mottos that are subject to creative and motivated interpretation during litigation. Or to put it another way, don't have mottos.

mpd 5y ago
> No reasonable person could understand the phrase, "Don't Be Evil," to mean, "Don't do things that I personally consider evil." TBH, I think almost everyone treats the former statement, as meaning the latter. Did you mistype here? Maybe there's even something different about using "evil" here, specifically. Would another word have a different outcome?
- bananabreakfast 5y ago
  No one treats it that way. A reasonable person should understand it not as requesting to make subjective personal judgments but rather as what it clearly was meant as: "Don't be Microsoft"
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mpd 5y ago

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

No, the problem is it’s flatly ridiculous to claim an employee code of conduct binds the company. What in the hell.

edmundsauto 5y ago
For public companies, this can be considered securities fraud - in the Matt Levine sense.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> No, the problem is it’s flatly ridiculous to claim an employee code of conduct binds the company Not only is it not ridiculous, but that employment policies like CoC’s generally constitute binding contracts (which, inherently, bind both parties) is fairly well established in employment law.
teh_infallible 5y ago
I think the idea is that if the employee is bound to the code of conduct, the company shouldn’t be able to force the employee to act in a way that violates it.

benatkin 5y ago

> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. That should be Google's problem. It would have been better if they had never stated that intention. They used it to ingratiate themselves to Mozilla and Linux users.

umvi 5y ago

> The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague. Exactly, depending on your political viewpoint, "Don't Be Evil" could mean some/all of the following: - Not doing business with China - Not doing business with ICE - Not doing business with any government - Not doing business with any other business that has currently-employed "evil" (politically incorrect) employees - Not building ad-tech - Not building free products where the monetization model involves user tracking - Not hiring enough minorities - Not firing "evil" employees (employees who are politically incorrect, who voted for X evil candidate, who don't fall in line with "good" thought/speech, etc)

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
It could even mean the opposite of each of these, depending on your perspective. - Maybe it's evil to do business in China, because it requires you to censor search results. - Or maybe it's evil not to, because you deprive Chinese people of an important utility, and you don't actually make them better off in any other way. - Maybe doing business with ICE is evil, because kids in cages. - Or maybe avoiding ICE is evil, because it's unpatriotic or undemocratic! Every single one of these actions or inactions could be construed to be evil depending upon one's personal values, moral code, or even one's understanding of various contested facts involved in the decision-making!
q1w2 5y ago
The point of a motto like this is to provide guidance when there's no specific company guidance. When the company publicly says they will do business with China, the vague motto doesn't allow you to refuse to do you job.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  The vague motto is not the issue; the detailed elucidation of the meaning in the code of content and the positive direction in the CoC (alleged to be, and this is consistent with the legal treatment of similar signed policy documents in employment law, a binding contract) to raise issues when either individual googlers at any level or the company as a whole seemed to be violating the policy as elucidated in that document are the issues. The specific direction to raise issues if the company as a whole appeared to be in violation cannot be reconciled with the idea that it did not apply to announced official company actions. And no one refused to do their job. The question is whether the things they were fired for doing were additional to, outside of, and inconsistent with their job or part of their job as specified in a binding contract with their employer.

protomyth 5y ago

They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil". The employee code of conduct, that they were made to sign as a condition of employment has the directive "Don't Be Evil" in it? Did Google legal review that document? Although often made fun of, there is a reason IBM legal required a license change in JSLint to get out of its "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." license clause. Heck, Google Code wouldn't host JSMin-PHP because of that clause ( https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code ).

dragonwriter 5y ago

> They signed an employee code of conduct which included "Don't Be Evil" No, the more key part is: “[...] everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct. [...] And if you have a question or ever think that one of your fellow Googlers or the company as a whole may be falling short of our commitment, don’t be silent.” There legal allegation is not that the company action was evil. It’s that it was reasonably within the realm of subjectively questionable conduct that the company had, in a binding contract with employees, demanded to be alerted to when employees had concerns, and that therefore retaliating against employees for their internal action consistent with that binding agreement is illegal.

AlbertCory 5y ago

Wrong on every count. > "movement within Google in pursuit of contractually obligated motto" is factually wrong, and that's what my post demonstrated. They started a movement that had nothing to do with what "don't be evil" meant. It didn't mean "justice for immigrants." > "The VP is mad, and gets revenge on you by getting you fired" Also bogus. This sort of thing did happen, and the security guards were celebrated, not fired. Any VP who tried this would himself (or herself) get fired. > "The problem here is "Don't Be Evil" is so vague" Wrong. Contract terms are construed by the law. Since Google wrote the contract, their interpretation tends to govern.

sokoloff 5y ago
> Since Google wrote the contract, their interpretation tends to govern. Contra proferentem (Latin: "against [the] offeror"), also known as "interpretation against the draftsman", is a doctrine of contractual interpretation providing that, where a promise, agreement or term is ambiguous, the preferred meaning should be the one that works against the interests of the party who provided the wording. Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem Note that CA has adopted this. I don’t think “don’t be evil” was part of the employment contract, but if it was, Google would likely wish it weren’t in this case.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  I'm a patent guy, not a lawyer, so this is well outside my zone of competence. A real lawyer could tell us how often Contra proferentem is used in practice, and whether it might apply here.

skeeter2020 5y ago

If I worked for Nike could I use "Just Do It" to justify any lapse in judgement? Promote conspiracy theories because Apple tells me to "Think Different"? Be a giant prick at work because EA tells me to "Challenge everything"? Seek damages because "Red Bull gives you wings" didn't literally deliver? Ignore Covid public health protocols because my employer KFC states "It’s finger-lickin’ good"? This is pretty thin material, specially because they were fired after repeated correction that clarified what they were doing was out of sync with any generic motto.

Eelongate 5y ago
Were any of those other corporate mottos in the code of conducts they made employees sign?

kodah 5y ago

What work was Google doing for CBP? I didn't see that mentioned.

butMyside 5y ago

The vagueness could be used against Google, but of course it won’t because semantic tradition. What’s the point of human language again? Except for trivial human tasks it’s easily exploited.

joshspankit 5y ago

I wish we had more ability to public remove the bias in titles through effort like this. This reply is on-point, addresses my immediate suspicion, counters an (assumably intentional) attempt to spread a negative narrative, and is excellently reasoned.