Google PR confirmed, to a reporter, on record. Not covered by nda.
Once you publicly disclose, the nda makes no sense.
Once you publicly disclose, the nda makes no sense.
Sorry, but no.
Pretty much all nda's in the world would disagree with you.
Heck, let's just take the first search result for "nda sample" and look at it: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/sample-confidentialit...
Stare at clause 2, and you will see that situation would still be covered by NDA.
In basically all NDA's, it's about who does it, not about how it's done.
(We're assuming #1's requirements were met, as most NDA's also say that. AFAICT, the other people in the room believe #1 was met. Pretty much every presentation by Google ever is stamped Google Confidential and Proprietary)
Ok, i see your point. I'll go ahead and stipulate that the reporter was a super villain, and google was lilly white in their intentions.
Google was very lucky their lawyers were not the brain dead morons that went on record with a reporter about confidential information. There are plenty of articles speculating about how +1 would affect search rankings in 2011, which gives quite a bit of room in 2(a).
Google was in a position of immense power, and their clown-car approach happened to work out for them. Seriously guys, the trick to fire is banging the rocks together.
Do not go on record with a reporter about confidential information. it's PR 101. Just don't do it. Ever.
edit
This is condescending and harsh. I'm going to leave it, rather than delete it, because i think big G's PR department should have known better. But maybe take the words with some salt.
Confirming confidential information something to someone under NDA doesn't violate the NDA.
>to a reporter
One's occupation has nothing to do with the legality or enforceability of an NDA.
> on record.
This is not a legal term, and has no legal value, but a practice in journalism. A journalist can publish things "off the record," it's fully legal it's just a way to ruin their reputation.
>Once you publicly disclose, the nda makes no sense.
Every serious NDA I've signed (dozens of them) has had a clause which basically says, "Once it becomes public it's no longer covered by this NDA."
However, Google didn't make the information public. They were talking to an employee of a business they have an NDA with (an employee which I'm sure has signed an NDA with Forbes and an agreement to honour all of Forbes' NDAs). Again, it's completely irrelevant that they're a reporter - as it should be. Could you imagine if Bezos/Amazon could violate any NDA they wanted as long as they passed the information onto a Washington Post reporter first? From the perspective of them being an employee of a company under NDA, this is clear as day.
Under most NDA's, this would not matter. She originally received it as part of her employer. Most NDA's exclude the disclosing party telling you somehow else as a way of it becoming non-confidential.
Again, i'll just take the first sample NDA google finds (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/sample-confidentialit...)
" (c) learned by the Receiving Party through legitimate means other than from the Disclosing Party or Disclosing Party's representatives"
Google PR telling a reporter a thing is "learned by the Receiving party from the disclosing party", not through another means. There was also no written approval here.
Pretty much every NDA i've ever seen (somewhere in the hundreds or thousands) would still cover the situation where PR confirmed something to someone that they had learned in an NDA'd situation.
Whether reporters respect these NDA's or not is another story. But this isn't even a close call. I think you'd struggle to find an NDA this wouldn't be a violation of.
A huge portion have always supported disclosure by journalists even when such disclosure represents an obvious violation of the law.
In short please pardon my language. Fuck the law.
People are angry with Google for abusing their power as a search engine to prevent journalists publishing true negative stories about Google.
I don't think people are going to be less angry after you explain that Google are doing this via the "clever hack" of informing the news site's SEO team about the negative story under NDA and using that to bind the site's journalists.
> The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.
I suppose that Google counsel could have thought this through in advance, and realized that they could block press coverage by using NDAs with media organizations. But that seems like an iffy strategy.
No actually, i'm not. As my profile says, at Google i run the C++ language teams. I gave up lawyering in any capacity for Google years ago.