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Nasir and Matt talk about the COO who left Lyft for Uber and is now being accused of breaching confidentiality agreements and soliciting employees. They then answer, "What is some good advice to avoid copyright infringement issues?" Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: All right. Welcome to our business podcast where we cover business legal news and answer some of your business legal questions that you, the listener, can send in to our email address which is the following… Go ahead, Matt. What is it? I guarantee you; Matt doesn’t know what it is. MATT: No, I’ve got it – ask@legallysoundsmartbusiness.com. NASIR: Okay. You’ve got it. Well, my name’s Nasir Pasha. MATT: And I’m Matt Staub, and I don’t think I actually even have access to that email now that I think about it. You’re the one that looks at all the who-knows-what emails we’re getting other than you. NASIR: Oh, yeah. I try to keep that to myself for my guilty pleasure reading before I go to bed. MATT: Extreme screening process that you do for everything we do. What do we have? We’ve got something I know you’re going to like today. NASIR: Is it about pizza? MATT: No, it’s not about pizza, but it is about one of the topics that are highly talked about on this podcast. We’re combining a few things here. We’ve got a dispute between Lyft and Uber. NASIR: Oh, nice. MATT: I know you are anti-Uber and I think this is actually going to probably make it worse for you because… NASIR: Worse or better? I think it’s going to be more support. Like, people are going to join my cause after today. MATT: Yeah, I’m saying you’re going to dislike Uber more after this. NASIR: Yeah. MATT: I need to get this guy’s name too because he had a pretty awesome name. I want to make sure I find it before I get into the story. NASIR: Travis VanderZanden. MATT: Yeah, great name. So, he’s the former COO of Lyft and now Lyft is suing him for a breach of confidentiality. There’s a confidentiality agreement and then a breach of fiduciary duty. Basically, he was a COO of Lyft so pretty high up exec and he’s being accused of essentially taking all this confidential information from Lyft before he then went to Uber. So, a few things that he’s done here that are obviously still accusations so I don’t want to say he’s done it or not but downloading non-public documents to his personal Dropbox before leaving so we’re talking confidential strategic product plans, financial info, forecasts, growth data. I guess they had a meeting set-up right before he was about to leave on – I believe – a Friday about his resignation. He cancelled a meeting last minute and then went home and backed up a number of emails and confidential documents to his home computer and cell phone. NASIR: Oh, man. MATT: Synched personal Dropbox to the company for up to three months out. So, those are a few of the things. I’m sure there’s more than that but, obviously, it’s accusations. But the problem with this is Lyft hired someone to go back and look at what happened and that’s how they know this happened because they can look at his computer and see that he pulled this information from his work computer and work phone and synched that to his personal accounts. Not looking good for old VanderZanden. NASIR: Gosh! There’s so many issues here. Well, one thing I was looking at the complaint – this was filed in California – they have only named him as the defendant so Uber has yet to be included in that and I say “yet” because either it’s a strategic decision not to include them or they don’t have the prerequisite fact allegations to do so. I would even imagine that, once this is filed now, they can start doing discovery and I don’t know what his position is at Uber. I mean, he was COO of Lyft and now he’s going to Uber. How does that confidential information not fall in the hands of Uber to not be included in the lawsuit? Maybe they wanted the discovery to see if that’s actually the case and see what culpability, if any,