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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

#171

Post by justinclift »

chii wrote: post #138
justinclift wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Customers really, really hate segmentation of product [1], esp. if the product end up being exactly the same! I think companies should stop trying to segment customers. It's a long term loss, despite a short term gain. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

> It's a long term loss, despite a short term gain.

While I dislike market segmentation as much as anyone, it seems like it worked out ok for Nvidia.

It let them keep a (very) profitable segment of the business, which in turn financed other developments and let them become the GPU leader for a very long time.

No idea how it'll play out in the end of course, but we're definite past the whole "short term" time frame.

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

#172

Post by blt »

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…

Maybe he was offered the job at Nvidia on the condition that he arrives with Valeo's code.

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

#173

Post by dmoy »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #137
dctoedt wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Question, in this case, is it a violation of patents + trade secrets, or just the patents?

The case in the original article is not patents at all. Closer to copyright? Idk if it's actually copyright or some other trade secret law (? sorry, don't know much about non-patent IP law)

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

#174

Post by teddyh »

muhehe wrote: post #58
kennethrc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11280740

Or https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0338337/

Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, available here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150419135441/http://american-b...>.

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

#175

Post by galangalalgol »

treprinum wrote: post #161
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 you use GitHub, you feed OpenAI with your code as training data already, with GitLab you do the same for Google.

If you use on-prem gitlab, presumably that is not the case.

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

#176

Post by User23 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #166
criddell wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Patents really shouldn't be granted when any competent junior engineer could have designed and implemented the feature. This method is doesn't pass the "nonobvious" test.

Batteries used to have cardboard instead of metal shells. Because of this batteries used to leak prolifically. Then an inventor patented the modern metal shelled battery. His competitors all started infringing so he sued. They claimed that the invention was "obvious." The judge ruled that it clearly wasn't obvious, because if it had been they wouldn't have been making the obnoxiously stupid cardboard batteries for so many years.

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

#177

Post by SushiHippie »

ric2b wrote: post #123
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.

AMD has open source drivers so it's basically just NVIDIA that doesn't. Unless you already want to count intel, not sure if they count as actual products or are still in early access.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...

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

#178

Post by Thorrez »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #130
Thorrez wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MIT license requires giving credit. The difference between MIT and GPL is that GPL requires sharing the modified source code and licensing it the same.

Yeaaahhh... I'm not going to argue about this. It's basically "Religion and politics," in this crowd, and discussions don't end well. I apologize for my joke.

Huh, I wasn't trying to argue one license is better than the other. I was just trying to clarify what the licenses require. I didn't want someone to see your comment and think that it would be ok to use someone else's MIT-licensed code in a product without giving credit.

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

#179

Post by two_in_one »

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 ChatGPT has a 'private' mode in which your conversation exists only while you keep it open. It's not used for training, an no human see it (presumably). The negative side is it disappears with no history, so you can't continue next day. That was introduced after complains similar to yours. Some companies put a total ban.

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

#180

Post by smallstepforman »

Most professional software engineers develop a coding style, with consistant function headers, names, case, variable naming etc. Rewriting a feature from scratch may look very similar to your previous work in a screenshot.

Not only do engineers face this problem, but so do hair dressers, architects, pizza masters, soccer players, etc when they switch employers.

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