HN user
I don't think this is a regular IP suit. It's more like a breach of contract or something. Opera likely hadn't legally protected the features/designs that were stolen, which would be why the theft would be such a bad thing for them.
It's been a year since the video that triggered the lawsuit was published. I doubt that someone at Opera has been pissed off for a year and done this without thinking through it at all.
Why would the current CEO be ousted? Why are you mad at him instead of the guy who allegedly stole Opera's business secret and sold them to a competitor?
Re-using ideas/features he was paid for at Opera? Doesn't that make those Opera's property?
What old innovations are they trying to claw back revenue from? Wasn't the disputed object actually a fairly new innovation?
> Why are they suing the guy and not Mozilla, why are there no lawsuits against other companies that provide browsers?
Probably because this isn't about features that already exist, but about features that Opera was working on and hadn't even made public yet. And this guy sold them to Mozilla or something.
Opera never had problems with other browsers copying them once the features were actually out, but in this case Opera's secret features were sold to Mozilla before Opera even had a version of their own.
It just so happens that Opera announced the financial results for the 1st quarter today:
http://www.newsweb.no/newsweb/search.do?messageId=326699
At the same time, they published a report on usage of their mobile browsers:
http://business.opera.com/smw/2013/03/
Record profits and revenues, and 20 million new users from February to March. Doesn't exactly look like a company in trouble to me.
But maybe you know something I don't.
Do Opera employees have to watch their steps to a greater degree than employees in other companies? I think that if you stole trade secrets from any other company and sold them to a competitor, they would sue you as well.
All you need to do to avoid being sued is to not sell trade secrets to competitors.
It seems pretty straightforward. Trond Hansen was apparently paid to do some consultancy design work for Opera. After accepting his paycheck and moving on, he decided to take the design(s) he made while at Opera, and give it to Mozilla.
This doesn't sound like a very clever thing to do. It sounds very illegal indeed.