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Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

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Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#91

Post by Xunxi »

Chinese have a good grasp of add-on innovation. Give a base product and they'll pad it with all manner of features to make it a very marketable product. Look at DJI's action camera's, drones, etc. I'm not even going to touch on the age old conflict in combating apparel clones in China town.

I have a feeling its going to be very difficult to cage this kind of innovation unless there is a recurrent policy in place to periodically ban the import of a wide range of Chinese products.

On the other hand there are lots of super smart Chinese students in top tier colleges who also make salient contribution to research work that benefits us in one way or the other.

The bigger question is how do we resolve both markets to mutually benefit from sunken R&D as opposed to how we starve consumers because of slow paced tinkering refinements when the other party can speed the product to market.

Case in point: Lit Motors

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#92

Post by NicoJuicy »

dirtyid wrote: post #7

Nreal optical hardware is closer to ODGs and very different to Magic Leap. Magic Leap acquired ODG patent portfolio recently (after effectively killing them via some backstabby acquisition shenanigans) and is now opportunistically patent trolling Nreal and the increasing amount of Chinese competition (Nreal has much better visual quality at a much lower price) using post rationalized accusations given current US-Chin…

But the design looked very similar to proptotypes who were confidential.

He did more than "inspired by"

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#93

Post by NicoJuicy »

paxys wrote: post #12
pvg wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but crucially, does not allege that Chi exfiltrated any CI/trade secrets or infringed on any IP Their complaint alleges exactly that, repeatedly.

Nowhere in the complaint do they ever mention a single specific bit of technology, code, design or patent stolen by Chi Xu. Their entire argument is that he signed a confidentiality agreement when he started working there so should not be able to start a competing company. This is going to be next to impossible to enforce in California, let alone China.

And that their design is very similar to an internal confidential prototype.

Which says more about the situation.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#95

Post by dang »

bodi wrote: post #50
nullwasamistake wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with pointing out a pattern

I like patterns too. For example have you ever noticed China artificially props up the US economy via bonds/debt/investment and in return has flagrantly been allowed to steal pretty much every byte of US IP, both from the private sector and defense with zero pushback from our "intelligence" community, legislature, and only a hand wavey stop it from the Obama admin? You still like patterns?

Would you please not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar? That's a violation both of the letter (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and spirit of this site.

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#97

Post by tastroder »

elamje wrote: post #51
majia wrote: post #49

Lessons learned from Magic Leap: don’t sign a non-compete agreement with your employee; you have to pay and it’s legally not enforceable in California. Ask your employee to sign a board confidentiality agreement and sue him if he works for a competitor. Also, I wonder if people would think differently if this case is about a Facebook employee left to work on a social media App like google+.

Possibly, but copying a web app is substantially simpler than copying AR tech. Considering magic leap was stealth with hundreds of millions in R&D, I would put it in a different category than making a similar web app.

> stealth with hundreds of millions in R&D

Wow. That number sounded high since I'm very unfamiliar with the space but according to crunchbase [1] they took in 2.6B in funding overall. Before this headset they mainly put out a few iterations of that gesture input device, right?

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/magic-leap

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#98

Post by chansiky »

Things like this is what prevents capable inventors from taking the necessary risk to develop a truly innovative product. My wish is for there to be better legal protection for entrepreneurs bringing new products to the market, in order to encourage innovation and long difficult r+d work.

My heart sinks every time I hear a story of copycats profiting off of the work of someone or some company that sank tons of hours and dollars into developing a unique product - going up down left right backwards forwards upside down right side up headfirst ass backwards - just to find a solution, and then to have all that effort once you’ve found the answer, be pulled from right under your feet because someone can do it better now that the answer has been discovered (because you put the hours to discover it). That’s just ducking awful. I remember seeing [this](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...) about a simple product and it made me so furious. The reality is it’s happening everywhere.

China and Chinese culture of designer knockoffs and blatant copycatting needs to start playing fair and follow the same laws as everyone else if they expect to deal respectably in international markets.

I’m wondering if with things like even the font being the same, wether or not the act of copycatting even registers as an offense to the people who do this.

And to make it clear my stance isn’t against Chinese people, some of my favorite people in this world are Chinese, it’s against a government that condones and does little, or turns a blind eye when a company is doing the equivalent of removing padding from a boxing glove. If we can’t resolve something like this through verbal communication and legal action what other options do we have?

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#99

Post by joyjoyjoy »

chansiky wrote: post #98

Things like this is what prevents capable inventors from taking the necessary risk to develop a truly innovative product. My wish is for there to be better legal protection for entrepreneurs bringing new products to the market, in order to encourage innovation and long difficult r+d work. My heart sinks every time I hear a story of copycats profiting off of the work of someone or some company that sank tons of hours…

"Things like this is what prevents capable inventors from taking the necessary risk to develop a truly innovative product. My wish is for there to be better legal protection for entrepreneurs bringing new products to the market, in order to encourage innovation and long difficult r+d work."

It has always be like this. Guess from who was Germany Stealing?

China will become one of the biggest IP proponents soon and they will be bitching about others (India?) stealing their IP

Re: Magic Leap Says Ex-Engineer Copied Headset for China

#100

Post by shasheene »

shasheene wrote: post #34

The article reports on the lawsuit, but is light on details about the headset. Tested recently did a 10 minute review on this headset, the 'Nreal Light' [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9A9u-lwjTs Regardless of the merits of the lawsuit, I can see why Magic Leap would be scared. The AR glasses looks great. They're certainly stylish enough for the mass-market -- they look like normal glasses at first glance, they'…

On the merits of the lawsuit, after reading the whole district court filing [1], the core allegation is that the 'Nreal Light' is based on Magic Leap's unproductized internal designs produced "after extensive investment of time (multiple years), money (hundreds of millions of dollars spent on research and development) and human resources (hundreds of engineers)", and that the defendant learned about the product designs and research during his employment, including adapting (as discussed elsewhere in this thread) Magic Leap's proprietary font (https://i.imgur.com/7pYZ8bp.png)

If Nreal Light is indeed based on Magic Leap's unreleased designs, this makes me very sympathetic to the price difference -- Magic Leap One is a development kit backed by 5+ years of huge R&D investment, and is/was never intended for end-users (hence the price and awful aesthetics).

The Nreal Light is an indication of what a consumer Magic Leap was going to be: a cheaper, slimmer, less ambitious product (by avoiding multiple waveguide displays) that appeals to a consumer market, then it's unfair and sad that they didn't have the opportunity to go to market with their own product.

On the other hand, Magic Leap has had ample opportunity to release an affordable high-quality AR headset so I do feel some sympathy in an employee leveraging legitimately acquired knowledge and experience to build a commercial product that beats its competitors. The situation may not that different to the Traitorous Eight, or Steve Jobs infamous "adapting" of design ideas of the Alto for the Apple Lisa and Apple Macintosh, after his visit to Xerox PARC.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.343717...

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