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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

#141

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

mangamadaiyan wrote: post #133
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://w…

Funny, I too worked for a company that did exactly this. The scanner was called "Black Duck" or some such.

I don’t remember the name of the company, but it was a single word that began with “P,” (I think).

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

#142

Post by blagie »

justinclift wrote: post #132
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.

For Nvidia, the most likely reason they've strongly avoided Open Sourcing their drivers isn't anything like that. It's simply a function of their history. They used to have professional level graphics cards ("Nvidia Quadro") using exactly the same chips as their consumer graphics cards. The BIOS of the cards was different, enabling different features. So people wanting those features cheaply would buy the consumer gr…

I suspect there are a few issues:

1) NVidia drivers had a lot of secret sauce to give high performance.

2) NVidia for machine learning still has a lot of platform lock-in (although fading gradually), and cross-compatibility doesn't help them

3) Quite often, if you've licensed something from a third-party, you can't legally open-source. Proprietary codebases sometimes get... messy.

I'm jumping ship as soon as Intel drivers are good enough. I don't trust AMD to have anything working -- too many bad experiences -- but Intel has a good track record. Arc A770 gives 16gb for $1000 NVidia card. I don't need maximum FLOPS. So long as deep learning models run, and 3d apps are accelerated, I'm happy.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #122

I seriously do not understand why any employee would steal their previous employers' code to use at a new employer. There's little-to-no personal upside, and only horrible downside if you get caught. I mean, this guy: > 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... Valeo said its form…

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by chii »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #75
wombatpm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if I have an idemic memory?

Then you'd be able to draw and type out everything from scratch directly on your employer's PC and not have to download it via USB drives or email, like this guy did.

So if you obtained an idemic memory via installing a camera, flash drive and io ports into your brain?

How or why is the mere transport method of information the distinction between infringement of IP vs not?

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

#145

Post by mattnewton »

happytiger wrote: post #139

Tertiary point but one that been on my mind… What’s the difference between one person doing it individually and a company doing it to train an AI? I mean isn’t this exactly what a lot of LLm training data is built on as well? I get there might be different legalities, but morally isn’t it all basically merely degrees of theft? Like this is trade secret theft, but training an AI on the code isn’t? You can download a c…

How is this morally theft anymore than hiring someone who has experience solving the problem to solve the problem again? As long as they aren’t reproducing the solution verbatim it’s already morally acceptable to hire experts for their experience. Why would “hiring” software for its “experience” be different?

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

#146

Post by chii »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #110
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

That sounds wrong in so many ways. Do you live in China or something where this is expected? I've worked at about 10 or so companies in 3 countries and it was never expected for the juniors to ever "bring documents from previous workplaces as knowledge and not tell about it". Bringing your "experience" means only the experience and problem solving skills that are in your head as we're in the knowledge work business.…

> Bringing your "experience" means only the experience and problem solving skills that are in your head

it's hard to differentiate experience with IP. For example, there might be a tricky problem (say, in manufacturing), and the solution is a trade secret. The "experience" from said employee is really just relaying that trade secret.

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

#147

Post by jandrewrogers »

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.

You can easily add terms to employment contracts that grant non-exclusive license to code you own that you use in the course of employment. I've done it many times. The only issue that has come up out of this is when someone wants a warrant of exclusivity downstream of that, but that has never been a showstopper.

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

#148

Post by YetAnotherNick »

crazygringo wrote: post #122

I seriously do not understand why any employee would steal their previous employers' code to use at a new employer. There's little-to-no personal upside, and only horrible downside if you get caught. I mean, this guy: > 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... Valeo said its form…

> There's little-to-no personal upside, and only horrible downside if you get caught.

Here you just mention upsides with very small chance of small downside. See the case for Anthony Levandowski which was much more serious crime as he knowingly created and sold a company with only moat being Wyamo docs and everything bad that could happen to him did happen. He spent 6 months in jail and now he rejoined as CEO in Pronto. The much more probable case is he got to enjoy $680M that Uber gave him and not have to worry about money again.

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

#149

Post by sircastor »

feelandcoffee wrote: post #128
crazygringo wrote: post #122

I seriously do not understand why any employee would steal their previous employers' code to use at a new employer. There's little-to-no personal upside, and only horrible downside if you get caught. I mean, this guy: > 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... Valeo said its form…

I wonder if this would become more common with things like ChatGPT. Let's say you've been working in place A, you show your code to an LLM service (like the dozen or so Copilot-like services) and tell them to refactor. And for the sake of argument, let's say the LLM uses your code and questions for its next training dataset. A few years pass, then you go to work at Place B, and ask a question that happens to be relat…

For this reason, and a few others, my workplace simply put a blanket ban on these kinds of tools. If our code is never exposed to the learning tool, it’s never in danger of being showing up somewhere else.

Incidental to that, I feel like these tools expose the reality behind “copyrighting code/math” and how fallacious it is. If the tool can generate the efficient methods of achieving a result, I think it becomes obvious that one shouldn’t be able to protect it via IP law.

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

#150

Post by randombits0 »

kahnclusions wrote: post #72
ip26 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but a patent can be invalidated if you can show that the idea is obvious to practitioners of the trade, i.e. given the same problem most software engineers would arrive at the same solution.

Same with the copyright. Purely functional code is not creative expression and cannot be copyrighted.
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