Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

engadget.com

21–30 of 242 posts

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#21
One of the generally accepted reasons why its hard to get graphics companies to open source their drives has always been that everybody is violating everybody else's patents. And while everybody knows this making it too obvious is a legal disadvantage. But I hadn't expected it was also true of copyright.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#25
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Risk is always balanced against reward. I doubt Nvidia is culpable here not because I have some strong belief in their morality but because I trust they would not take stupid tradeoffs.

IMO this is more of a "don't ask don't tell" thing. I'm sure there was never an explicit agreement that the employee would bring trade secrets, but they can promise to be able to build for Nvidia what was built at the last company, and Nvidia could say "yes I want that", and not audit the new employee's dev environment.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#26
post #12

This often happens ingenuously, not out of calculated ill intent. Coders will keep code snippets and thoughts in personal knowledge tools like Notion, and then reuse them in different companies. Or contractors will straight up copy and paste code from source files of projects they worked on for different companies, thinking "I wrote it, so I could write it again, but why bother?", or something along those lines. Peop…

what about this:

>Valeo said its former employee admitted to stealing its software and that German police found its documentation and hardware pinned on Moniruzzaman's walls when his home was raided. According to Bloomberg, he was already convicted of infringement of business secrets in a German court and was ordered to pay €14,400 ($15,750) in September.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#27
post #12

This often happens ingenuously, not out of calculated ill intent. Coders will keep code snippets and thoughts in personal knowledge tools like Notion, and then reuse them in different companies. Or contractors will straight up copy and paste code from source files of projects they worked on for different companies, thinking "I wrote it, so I could write it again, but why bother?", or something along those lines. Peop…

> paste code from source files of projects they worked on for different companies

I wonder what would happen if legal action started between two companies and it turned out a coder pasted code from personal projects that predates both.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#28

TFA makes it sound as if the entirety of the blame can be placed on one employee. Sure, his actions do seem to support that view, but then again, Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming w…

I don't have direct knowledge of this company or the parties involved but I would be highly doubtful that Nvidia would want to have an employee steal the secrets of a competitor/partner. In my experience, companies of this size would aggressively not want tainted IP inside their companies. He would need to be bringing across something as valuable as AGI, cure for cancer, etc for it to be even worth considering. There…

The company I worked for, was paranoid as hell about IP in the code. They hired some source scanning firm, for a lot of money, to continually scan our codebase.

They were mostly looking for GPL (nasty, naasssssty GPL!) code, but they also scanned for code that couldn't be accounted for in our "clean" repos. Not exactly sure how that worked (or even, if it worked at all. I think they brought smoke[0]).

[0] https://www.tell-a-tale.com/nasreddin-hodja-story-smoke-sell...

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#29

> German police found its documentation and hardware pinned on Moniruzzaman's walls when his home was raided WTF actually prints out documentation? Let alone pins it to their walls? I mean....seriously does anybody actually do this?

I do. I can't read any length of text on a screen. I pin stuff to the wall too, of quick sheet character. Like Emacs hotkeys, C operator precedence, pinouts, general specs etc.

Re: Nvidia sued for stealing trade secrets: blunder showed rival company's code

#30

TFA makes it sound as if the entirety of the blame can be placed on one employee. Sure, his actions do seem to support that view, but then again, Nvidia did hire him precisely for his previous experience at this rival company, on the very same project that the two companies were partnered on, which is the same project that Nvidia hired him for. There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming w…

I don't have direct knowledge of this company or the parties involved but I would be highly doubtful that Nvidia would want to have an employee steal the secrets of a competitor/partner. In my experience, companies of this size would aggressively not want tainted IP inside their companies. He would need to be bringing across something as valuable as AGI, cure for cancer, etc for it to be even worth considering. There…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN