Waze on its way to court: A motion to approve a class action lawsuit has been filed with the court against Waze, the developer of the free navigation app, and five other defendants. At this stage, the lawsuit is estimated at $64 million.
The plaintiff, Roy Gorodish, represented by attorney Yitzhak Aviram, claims that Waze violated an express commitment that the software, map, and information stored by Waze would be open - so that everyone would have access to the source code, maps, and all data layers. He also claims theft of property and copyright of the community in the software, the map, and the entire project, since, according to him, Waze stole the Freemap project from its owners while violating the moral rights of the creators, and sold it to Akrom, a subsidiary of Google.
The Freemap and Waze software code is "open source," and since Gorodish claims so, it must be available to anyone who wishes to use it in any way they see fit. Gorodish also requests that all maps in the defendants' possession and all data layers therein that were created using the Freemap or Waze applications be accessible and open to use by anyone who so desires.
In addition, he demands that an expert on behalf of the court examine the code of Google Maps - Google's maps application, which began to include components from Waze - to determine whether the ruling will also apply to this application.
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Gorodish wants to present a simple and powerful argument to the court: Waze, he says, did not inform Google when it sold it that it did not create the map and software. The software and map were built on a free software called 1Roadmap, and as part of the Freemap project, which was a community project and owned by the community, features were added to the software and changes were made to it. Most of the changes were made by one of the defendants - a developer named Ehud Shabtai - but Gorodish claims that some of them were updated by other users. "The software and map were the product of an entire community that tested and fixed it daily, and without it, the 'Waze' software would not have been created," he says.
When Waze sold the project for about a billion dollars, Koval Gorodish, 90% of which was attributed to the intellectual property, and it divided the amount among its associates. Waze forgot about the drivers who worked on the Freemap project on the development, creation of the map and its adaptation to the software, on the road. Gorodish recalls that on the day the project was founded, it was presented to the community members as a community-owned venture. Later, when Waze was founded and the software was in an advanced version with a mostly finished product, the company owners changed the terms unilaterally without the community's consent.
Now, as stated, Gorodish has turned to the court, hoping to receive compensation in a court ruling equal to 50% of Waze's intellectual property assets, which he currently estimates at approximately $880 million, plus a compensation payment of one hundred thousand shekels for each member of the group for the damage caused to him by the violation of the moral right of copyright infringement. At the same time, Gorodish is demanding that the court determine that the defendants must establish a capital fund to invest in open source projects in Israel at the value of the intellectual property and the value of the consideration for the open source and map data.
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