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

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

#41

Post by AshamedCaptain »

pritambaral wrote: post #6

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…

A problem here is that while the companies will generally make very clear that they don't want you to have any single line of code, any schematic, any drawing, anything at all from your previous company; they may also expect you to bring "experience" from the previous company, thereby pressuring more junior employees into doing exactly that - bringing some docs from the previous company - but not telling about it. Through my career I have been to several meetings where everyone was, notebook in hand, expecting to hear the "experience" from the new guy. That is obviously as legal as it gets, but the pressure for the junior employee to have kept a couple of notes is there, and you'd never know.

i.e. I suppose no one was aware that he had this code, and it's unlikely it went into nvidia's codebases or that nvidia wanted it; but it also doesn't mean nvidia did not pressure the guy into doing that.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

Symmetry wrote: post #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.

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by FirmwareBurner »

margalabargala wrote: post #25
takinola wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>IMO this is more of a "don't ask don't tell" thing.

I assure you isn't. If your company (in the law abiding west) has any suspicion you're using another company's illegally obtained proprietary IP, they won't see you as some hero doing God's work and put you on the promotion track wile closing a blind eye to what you're doing, but they immediately ask you to delete everything and every trace related to that.

Foreign IP is radioactive and they don't want to get sued because you're bringing some source code and PDFs from their competitor, which might not even be that useful for them anyway.

There were even cases of companies ratting out their employees they found using IP they stolen from their previous employers and getting them arrested, because if you stole IP from their competitor what's stopping you from also stealing from them?

>not audit the new employee's dev environment

Audit how? Against what? Stolen foreign source code you don't have? That's just not realistically possible to audit every employees work and accurately determine if they are or not reusing source code they stolen form a competitor, especially if the employee doing this is careful to change or redact what he's checking in.

Only thing you can audit is against FOSS code that is public, but not if it's stolen proprietary code and the employee made sure to not check-in anything giving away the origin of the original IP holder. They didn't catch this guy until he got sloppy and made this huge blunder.

You can never secure everything and audit everyone, especially if you want people to get any work done and not feel violated, so everything boils down to trusting employees they won't steal from you, and trusting the legal framework and law enforcement they'll do their job when in need, so you just have everyone sign NDAs and hope for the best.

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

#44

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

kuroguro wrote: post #27
clnq wrote: 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.

INAL (so take this with the pinch of salt that it comes from someone just thinking out loud), but I think it would depend on a number of factors such as how novel the code was, and how integral the code is (just to name two factors)

If the code was something as simple as let’s say leftpad for a simple example, it could be argued that it’s not the “meat” of the application so those few lines can not by themselves be copyrighted but the whole work (or even larger portions of it) can be.

If it was some special sauce algorithm, it could be argued under their work contract that the employee assigned copyright of the code of the personal project to the first employer they did the work for.

It also depends on the status of the employee, the contract of the employee, and the jurisdiction of both employee/employee.

A “full fledged” employee work is often deemed as the companies property if done under the course of their employment. A contractor in the US is about the same, however in the UK a contractor by default can retain the copyright of the “work product” unless stipulated otherwise in the work contract (so most contracts will state that you as a contractor are assigning copyright for the work you do to the company).

So in that last case it could be argued that the coder still owns the copyright but licenses the use to both parties. It would then be a case of the two companies maybe suing the coder for selling code they may have represented as given them an exclusive license to it, but obv didn’t because it was licensed to multiple companies.

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

#45

Post by ohyes »

clnq wrote: 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…

Or worse, they may just remember how they coded it last time and code it the same, or only remember subconsciously and code it the same without knowing.

Someday there will be technology to erase all memory of work you did in service of your corporate overlords and you’ll be able to start with a true clean slate at every job.

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

#47

Post by ip26 »

Symmetry wrote: post #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.

Given independent invention is apparently not a defense against infringement, that makes a lot of sense. I can’t even imagine trying to screen the codebase for that.

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

#48

Post by __turbobrew__ »

kuroguro wrote: post #27
clnq wrote: 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.

For most contractual agreements you assign copy-write of your work to your employer. So if you used your personal project in work for your employer the copy-write becomes theirs.

My guess is that in your hypothetical scenario the first company would own the IP and could sue the worker or other company for infringement.

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

#49

Post by ohyes »

mcpackieh wrote: post #39
IshKebab wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear what he means. He means that the managers and executives are ok with stealing code.

How many managers need to be in-the-loop with the theft before we can fairly say "the corporation knows"? As far as I'm concerned, even if no managers are aware of it, they should have been aware of it (it's their job to know what their reports are doing) so the corporation should be liable for the theft. Otherwise it's trivial for everybody to play dumb and turn a blind eye to what's going on.

The magic number is 1 manager.

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

#50

Post by Xelynega »

mcpackieh wrote: post #39
IshKebab wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear what he means. He means that the managers and executives are ok with stealing code.

How many managers need to be in-the-loop with the theft before we can fairly say "the corporation knows"? As far as I'm concerned, even if no managers are aware of it, they should have been aware of it (it's their job to know what their reports are doing) so the corporation should be liable for the theft. Otherwise it's trivial for everybody to play dumb and turn a blind eye to what's going on.

Yea "they were too big to know something illegal was going on" is a narrative that benefits these large companies while ensuring any individuals or small companies that do the same see the full force of the law.
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