Taxi Apps, an Australian startup that developed taxi-hailing app GoCatch, lodged a 196-page statement of claim in the
The trial, which opened Tuesday, is scheduled to last for 10 weeks and comes two weeks after
The drivers had demanded compensation for losses since
Taxi Apps lawyer
Neither statement of facts has yet to be released by the court.
Hodge said
“Uber is a company that quite deliberately set out to break the law in the hope that they could do it at such mass scale that they would ultimately be able to pressure people to allow them to then operate lawfully, and they did so intending to gain a competitive advantage,” Hodge told the court in opening his case.
“They appear to remain completely unrepentant about that and it ought, to pick up the language of exemplary damages, be something that shocks the conscience,” Hodge added.
Hodge said if
But UberX now dominates the Australian rideshare market and GoCatch, launched in 2014, departed the transport industry in 2021.
“Uber firmly rejects any suggestion that we should be liable for the failure of other P2P businesses to adapt to an emerging competitive landscape,” the statement said, referring to peer-to-peer rides without professional drivers.
GoCatch co-founder
“Uber has never accepted responsibility for its conduct towards GoCatch. Uber’s first priority was to win at any cost using any method to destroy us as a competitive threat,” Campbell said in a statement.
“We are fortunate to be in a position to go to court as we believe that is the only pathway for
“I want to destroy them before they get too legit,” Uber’s former Australian general manager David Rohrsheim said in an email to colleagues in 2013.
“We are heading towards UberX but we need to crush GoCatch first,” Rohrsheim also wrote.
The trial will continue on Wednesday before Justice
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