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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

#151

Post by jakobson14 »

tremere wrote: post #129
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 is tremendous upside. You can look like a rockstar at the new company and propel yourself upwards with that momentum.

Pure mythology.

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

#152

Post by Silhouette »

sircastor wrote: post #149
feelandcoffee wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obvi…

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.

But these kinds of tools can only do that because someone else already put in the work to write the solutions that are used to train their models. Isn't this exactly the kind of situation when copyright is supposed to apply?

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

#153

Post by bennyg »

sircastor wrote: post #149
feelandcoffee wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obvi…

Self-hosted LLM is really the only way to do this.

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

#154

Post by yumraj »

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…

You’re assuming all/large portion of the stolen code was developed by him and he could have even written all of it at the NVIDIA.

Maybe he needed all that to actually perform in the new job.

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

#155

Post by kaliqt »

Silhouette wrote: post #152
sircastor wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obvi…

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. But these kinds of tools can only do that because someone else already put in the work to write the solutions that are used to train their models. Isn't this exactly the kind of situation when copyright is supposed to apply?

But with enough training data, it's not generating it because it remembers the exact code line for line, it does it because it knows that to be a good method. Especially if you ask it to refactor it, that's a whole new creation even if it's been done before by some engineer somewhere.

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

#156

Post by hobs »

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?

Then it's fine in the United States at least - all the laws are about copying data/files/assets not about using your mind.

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

#157

Post by lsllc »

Compare Moniruzzaman with Sergey Aleynikov [0] who allegedly "stole" [open source] Erlang code from Goldman Sachs, was arrested by the FBI at Newark airport, found guilty in Federal court and was initially sentenced to 8 years in jail although it was overturned on appeal. He was then tried again on the same charges this time in NY state courts and again the conviction was overturned but then reinstated on appeal by the NYC DA, he was ultimately sentenced to time served (1 year) while waiting for the federal trial as he was deemed a "flight risk".

So I think with "only" a €14,400 fine, Moniruzzaman did better than Sergey despite apparently committing an actual crime.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

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

#158

Post by juunpp »

mcpackieh wrote: post #95
beardedwizard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Companies of this size have routine code audits that would find copyright infringements of this sort. If the employee literally brought in source code files and not even change the name of the directory like it was highlighted here, it'd have been caught. The audit is also not conducted by the manager, but a third party. There is no possible way this would fly unless the individual intentionally stripped the source of copyright notices (the individual's fault), or the source code was just sitting on their laptop and never acted upon, etc.

So I think the question (and I'm not a lawyer...) is whether Nvidia conducted such audit and to what extent (if any) the other company's source code was merged into theirs (versus just sitting on the laptop).

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

#159

Post by juunpp »

zer00eyz wrote: post #113
whatshisface wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memorizing a sizable fraction of Windows source code so you can take it to Apple sounds like the most pointless and difficult heist imaginable!

This sounds like the plot to a Netflix movie...

https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute...

Wine does not allow people who have worked on Windows to contribute precisely for this reason, with some nuances as noted in the link above.

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

#160

Post by juunpp »

fnord77 wrote: post #108
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…

And nobody at NVDA noticed when the employee pushed several GB of code into NVDA's repos?

Where is the proof that the source code was merged? The article only mentions that former employees caught an eye of the source on the individual's computer; it does not mean the source code was merged or acted upon.
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