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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

#211

Post by KeplerBoy »

juunpp wrote: post #158
mcpackieh wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Seems hard to catch at an audit. Surely he just used the stolen code as reference and didn't re-use entire files containing "Copyright by Valeo".

If he would have been any smarter, he would have kept the stolen files on a private computer and he would have gotten away with it.

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

#212

Post by gbin »

blt wrote: post #172
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.

This seems so so extremely unlikely for an auto parking feature vs the huge legal risk and the certainty of getting caught: at any time Valeo can see that an algorithm is tuned similarly, sue and find their source code at Nvidia. The AV department at Nvidia is huge and it is not like they don't know what they are doing.

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

#213

Post by dbattaglia »

edgyquant wrote: post #118
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…

>Coders will keep code snippets and thoughts in personal knowledge tools like Notion, Do they? I’ve never personally done such a thing, though I may keep some code in public GitHub repos. I’ve rewritten quite a bit of the same logic at most places I’ve worked over the years.

I’ve seen it happen, including other employees telling me I should make sure to zip up my code before I left (which I would never do). It’s only been at the earlier companies I worked for with many devs of questionable skill level. I’m not sure what’s behind the mentality, I assumed the act of writing decent code was challenging to them or it was perhaps something they were proud of, but maybe it’s also some misplaced sense of ownership. At one company I’ve experienced a dev asking back printouts of a design for a CRM at the end of a presentation, I assumed it was “borrowed” from their last job (thankfully we went a different direction). But regardless it definitely is a thing.

> I’ve rewritten quite a bit of the same logic at most places I’ve worked over the years.

Same here. I’ve learned to enjoy it, like perfecting a craft.

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

#214

Post by user_7832 »

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-...

Thanks, that was an excellent read. If that article hasn't been posted to HN recently, I think it deserves to be posted.

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

#215

Post by clnq »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #147
kuroguro wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Isn’t it almost always much better in acquisitions that the acquired company owns all of their code? I have been told so many times. Apparently the valuation is significantly impacted if they do not.

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

#216

Post by swores »

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.

> "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."

Why do you think that either the ethics or the willingness to risk breaking the law would be different between people being hired by a company vs. people working at a company?

A company's decisions are the decisions made by people who work there, and who once were being hired there. For a company to be complicit in encouraging a new hire bringing illegal IP with them requires one or more people at the company to make the same ethical/risk decision as the person joining. It doesn't require an announcement at an all-hands followed by a long slack conversation with the legal department, it doesn't need to be a huge scale conspiracy.

And it's no harder for a person who said "hey come bring your old employer's IP to my team" to keep it a secret from the entire company than it is for the person who joined doing that to do so.

In fact it's a bit easier, as long as they weren't stupid enough to discuss in a way that gets logged, the person or people encouraging it from inside the company are less likely to get caught, as a comparison of IP may be enough to prove wrongdoing on the part of the person who brought it, while anyone in the company who encouraged it couldn't be caught unless somebody ratted them out.

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

#217

Post by denton-scratch »

kmeisthax wrote: post #55
winocm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thought that came to me recently in the shower: Isn't all knowledge effectively based on previous knowledge, and by extension, experience? i.e: A programmer knows how to do X, leaves a company to do Y, where Y is in the same field of work as X. Doesn't X still affect the programmer on a subconscious level and henceforth, their thoughts indirectly?

This is the "inevitable disclosure" argument - AKA the idea that the experience is the secret, and thus nobody should ever be allowed to switch employers ever again. For various reasons (notably, the fact that slavery is illegal), we don't accept this in general. You have to show that secrets were copied in full . Employees cannot memorize millions of lines of source, they can only memorize vague architectural detail…

> nobody should ever be allowed to switch employers ever again

Venetian glassmakers were banned from leaving Venice with their technical know-how. The Venetian government employed assassins to take them down if they tried to defect.

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

#218

Post by justinclift »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #210
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…

Nvidia still sells Quadro cards with the same chips as their gaming counterparts but much more VRAM. They are mainly used for workstations (CAD stuff, VFX, some CFD, maybe also some AI for small scale testing).

Didn't they rename things a while ago?

I'm remembering this, though it's possible some things might have escaped the rename:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/quadro/

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

#219

Post by denton-scratch »

clnq wrote: post #215
jandrewrogers wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t it almost always much better in acquisitions that the acquired company owns all of their code? I have been told so many times. Apparently the valuation is significantly impacted if they do not.

My Director of Development once explained to me that our company rented all its offices; that its only assets (other than people) was its code; and people can leave. He was scrupulous about keeping GPL out of the codebase.

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

#220

Post by krsdcbl »

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…

Rationally seen, you'd at least have to assume to get caught at some point, and you'd have to assume the company will do anything to hold you alone accountable for damages, therefore making any possible upside a terrible risk reward scenario for you - so far true.

Also if it was your own code, stealing it to "kickstart" your position at your new employer also feels like a rather bad deal: just bringing your knowledge and spend a good part of your time recreating something you already know how to do sounds like low effort for big money, a much better deal for you if your aim was to get better comp and job security.

The one thing that might skew this equation, and can only be theorized about with the knowledge we have here would be if your new employer DID collude with you and proposed tremendous returns for giving them access - eg a kind of off-the-record deal where you'll engage in corporate espionage & theft of ip for big cash following through some hidden compensation construct.

Assuming the latter would border on conspiracy theories and i don't want to suggest this would have been the case here. Just a play of thoughts to add to the reasoning that YOU doing it on your own for ill-guided hypothetical benefits might not be the sole factor leading to such theft at all.

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