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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

#91

Post by objclxt »

anon373839 wrote: post #78
throwaway54_56 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen patents. The whole point is to share a method of doing something, in return for exclusive use of that method for a period of time. That's the theory, anyway.

I’m sure we’ll all be glad one day that Apple shared this research breakthrough: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/6/16614038/apple-samsung-sl...

You realize the patent you’re referring to was a design patent, not a utility patent? They are very different, the former only covers look and feel, not method.

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

#92

Post by bsder »

Guthur wrote: post #69
juunpp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, this happens all the time. > There is no argument to be made that Nvidia wasn't aware he'd be coming with secrets. This is not a logical conclusion from the above. Hiring for the exp is fine. Hiring for the trade…

[flagged]

Agreed.

NVIDIA has always been a no holds barred competitor willing to push the boundaries of both truth and legality.

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

#93

Post by criddell »

anon373839 wrote: post #78
throwaway54_56 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen patents. The whole point is to share a method of doing something, in return for exclusive use of that method for a period of time. That's the theory, anyway.

I’m sure we’ll all be glad one day that Apple shared this research breakthrough: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/6/16614038/apple-samsung-sl...

A good example of a patent that was challenged in court and wasn’t totally invalidated is Amazon’s 1-click ordering. They patented storing customer shipping and payment details in a database so they could purchase something with a single click.

It expired in 2017 but for the period it was in force, Amazon collected millions in licensing fees.

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

#95

Post by mcpackieh »

beardedwizard wrote: post #87
zik wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No serious company would do the latter It happens literally all the time: [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/27/anthony-l... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/22/23317502/xiaolang-zhang-p... [3] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-engineer-sentenced... [4] https://apnews.com/article/korea-samsung-china-copycat-semic... [5] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-may-face-difficul...

This proves individual employees routinely steal trade secrets; yes, they do. It does not prove that the companies they join (US public companies in the United States anyway) willfully use it. Think about the large scale conspiracy required to keep something like that secret from an entire company.

There's no need to rope conspiracies into this. The structure of incentives in corporate environments have people in the company not looking for something they don't want to find. Managers would rather not know about violations and be able to tell their boss that their team are pros who got the job done fast, than investigate their reports for violations and quite possibly find a big mess that needs to be cleaned up.

Point is, shit that shouldn't happen routinely does happen anyway. "That wouldn't happen because it would be illegal" is generally bullshit.

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

#96

Post by mkl »

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…

The screen sharing incident is not the important thing that happened here. From the article:

> Moniruzzaman allegedly gave his personal email unauthorized access to Valeo's systems to steal "tens of thousands of files" and 6GB of source code shortly after that development. He then left Valeo a few months later and took the stolen information with him when he was given a senior position at NVIDIA, the complaint reads.

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

#97

Post by themoonisachees »

wombatpm wrote: post #74
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bringing knowledge is one thing, which is legal, but stealing source code and design files from your employer to copy it to the systems of their competitor where you now work is a completely different thing which is illegal. Companies want your knowledge, not you bringing proprietary IP from their competitor to work, as they know that's a very expensive lawsuit waiting to happen.

But what if I have an idemic memory?

Idemic or "photographic" memory as depicted in popular culture does not exist. most of the people who can remember a lot of information very quickly are actually on some level of deliberately using mnemotechnique methods, such as nursery ryhming (like that one released soldier in vietnam) or graph traversal. it's preposterous to assume that anyone could recite fragmented data such as source code simply by being exposed to it (ie not by purposefully memorizing it)

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

#98

Post by dmoy »

dctoedt wrote: post #79
throwaway54_56 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Violating patents is one thing, as you're only violating the concept/idea, but the implementation is still up to you The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality.

> The concept/idea is not what is patented. The patent is (or should be) for the specific execution of the idea. Competitors are free to implement their feature using methods other that what is covered by the patent, even if the end result gives the exact same functionality. IP lawyer here (EDIT: not yours, of course): That's a considerable (and potentially-dangerous) oversimplification. What matters is whether what…

Yea, this is a more correct explanation. Not a patent lawyer, but raised by one lol.

Tangentially, it gets difficult in software because a lot of patents are .... maybe overbroad in their wording of claims. Lot of ambiguous looking landmines.

This is somewhat similar to business method patents (which were curtailed a little by the SC a decade ago, but were already known to be kinda sketchy for decade+ before that). Can't patent a pure algorithm, for example.

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

#99

Post by anthk »

kkielhofner wrote: post #88
steponlego wrote: post #9

I just avoid NVIDIA because they hate Free Software, not for any other reason.

400 GH repos: https://github.com/orgs/NVIDIA/repositories Not to mention tons of other projects that live outside of the main org, contributions to other projects all over the place, etc. So much hate for free software. The “I hate Nvidia because all I know is their driver is proprietary” schtick is old. They crossed the $1T mark in value solely because of the almost completely open source ecosystem (a large portion…

CUDA. Non-free firmware. Still bad. And Radeon the same, propietary firmware run by the kernel is needed sometimes to even boot the GPU, it just happens Linux-Libre patches it and the Modesetting driver will work fine until you call 3D accelerated calls, when that happens the system may either panic or crash X entirely. That can be fixed by setting RenderAccel to none in the X.org config file.

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

#100

Post by anthk »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #65
AndroTux wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germans. We love printing, faxing and scanning stuff.

>Germans. > Mohammad Moniruzzaman Very German.

By that name it could be a modern Spaniard, French or German fully assimilated to the culture. Specially if he was born there.
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