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I don't think you understand intellectual property law. > "leaving your employer with their code" From how I understood it, he didn't necessarily copy the cod
by Hydraulix989 10y ago
I don't think you understand intellectual property law.
> "leaving your employer with their code"
From how I understood it, he didn't necessarily copy the code to his personal hard drive, only the emails.
> "he rewrote the technology ... from scratch"
It's a lot tougher to argue that there is a misappropriation of IP if it's a clean room implementation. Code IS the intellectual property here (often, this is even explicitly stated in the standard PIIA agreement).
Now, Zenimax's only recourse is possible trade secret misappropriation, which is much harder to establish in court, given the lack of tangible evidence in the form of copied code.
That said, the State of California is particularly protective of workers' rights in this latter scenario, non-compete agreements are actually banned here.
- nihonde 10y agoNo clean room implementation includes the person who wrote (or saw or used) the original code at another company. Also, email is company IP, or at least confidential info and/or trade secrets.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoNo. (To both.) See my cousin post.
- nihonde 10y agoI'm a lawyer, and I continue to disagree.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoExplain?
- nihonde 10y agoI explained above. Work email is likely to include at least confidential information, possibly trade secrets. If I attach a super secret drug formula to an email, do you think it stops being company IP? As for clean room, there are attempts to reverse engineer that will fail, and then there are attempts that exclude everyone who was exposed to the original IP, which might have a chance of surviving at trial.
- horsetacular 10y agoYou may be a lawyer, sir, but I am two lawyers, stacked together in a trenchcoat in deference to one of the classic japes, and I can tell you that the things you are saying sound vaguely wrong to bottom lawyer.
- dleslie 10y agoFrom the article: > he testified that he didn't use this code I read that as implying that the emails included code. As a developer, my emails have included code; and it's not so surprising that his emails would have included code when he was working with an external party. > if it's a clean room implementation It cannot be a clean room implementation if the same individual is involved in the creation of both instances.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoNo. Emails are considered correspondence, not IP: https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-message-considered-intellectual-property https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-message-considered-intelle... As for clean room implementations, that is true, except in California. Here, it does not really hold in court at all: You can leave one company to join another doing more or less the same thing (because non-competition clauses are banned here), as long as you do not copy the code itself. It sounds like you and your uncle post are both programmers trying to look at things too much from a logically moral perspective, rather than actually how the courts view these things, since you aren't very familiar with the latter.
- dleslie 10y agoAre the attachments considered correspondence? If so, what's to prevent me from attaching all of the company's code to my email and later walking away with it?
- Hydraulix989 10y agoAttachments are considered files, and generally courts don't react too friendly whenever they find out that you were trying to be clever and use some sort of "loophole" like that.
- dleslie 10y agoThat's what I figured. I don't think it's unlikely that among the thousands of emails Carmack downloaded on his last day, that some of those which involved working with an external developer would have included such attachments.