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They're alleging breach of duty of loyalty and breach of contract. He was setting up and soliciting Apple employees for his new business while employed at Apple

They're alleging breach of duty of loyalty and breach of contract. He was setting up and soliciting Apple employees for his new business while employed at Apple. If he left and tried to poach his former co-workers that would have been fine. And he did sign an Intellectual Property Agreement, which is included in the filing on page 15. https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/12/10/apple_v_gerard_williams.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/12/10/apple_v_gerard_williams.pd...

gamblor956 7y ago
Both of those activities are permissible under CA law, and the second activity (recruiting) is explicitly not illegal as of 2019... And Apple is not alleging violations of their IP. They are alleging that he learned non-Apple-IP things during his time at Apple and is now using that knowledge at his new company.
- Despegar 7y ago
  As far as I know there are no non-solicitation or non-compete agreements involved in this case at all. It all hinges on the fact that he was employed by Apple and owed them his undivided loyalty.
  - sillysaurusx 7y ago
    Then I hope the case is thrown out. Companies have no loyalty to us. Why should we have loyalty to the company? Ah yes, because they have money and power. Sounds familiar. I think I get the argument – "how could society function if every employee were allowed to actively sabotage the company they worked for?" – I just don't buy it. Most people have no interest in doing such things. The law of large numbers seems to guarantee it won't be a big problem in practice. And I'm more in the "Let employees have civil liberties" camp than "Let companies protect themselves from any conceivable harm." And besides, we have a clear remedy for employees who sabotage their companies: fire them. From a cursory reading, it sounds like this person used his technical expertise to go start a startup, and tried to recruit some of his peers to leave their cushy bigco job and go help him. Y'know who else did that? Shockley Semiconductor.
    - ratww 7y ago
      > Y'know who else did that? Shockley Semiconductor. Steve Jobs himself also recruited some folks from Apple when he left to found Next.
      - briandear 7y ago
        After he left. He didn't decide to start Next while at Apple using Apple resources with the intent to sell it back to Apple. That's a big difference.
        ratww 7y ago
        Nope. "Over the previous six months, Jobs had kept in contact with some of the senior staff in the Macintosh division, even after Gassée took control. Five of these staffers agreed to become cofounders of the new company with Jobs. Chief among these were Bud Tribble, Susan Barnes, and Dan’l Lewin." [1] "After several months of being sidelined, Jobs resigned from Apple on September 13, 1985. He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him." [2] He also intended on licensing the tech to Apple, according to those sources. [1] https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triumphant-return-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
        ksec 7y ago
        Well I read this as more of an agreement to your OP rather than disagree. He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him and He also intended on licensing the tech to Apple, according to those sources. i.e The board were both acknowledged and have a common interest.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    It all hinges on the fact that he was employed by Apple and owed them his undivided loyalty. Employees do not owe their employers their undivided loyalty. The lowest-level employees don't owe their employer anything when their shift ends. They're free to work for a competitor for the next 8 hours if they choose. Salaried employees generally don't owe their employer anything once they leave the office and stop work for the day...though only in a few states like CA are workers granted explicit protections for their extracurricular ventures. Only executives might owe undivided loyalty, and even then that is a provision of the employment contract that must be explicitly negotiated and paid for by the employer.
    - ksec 7y ago
      >The lowest-level employees don't owe their employer anything when their shift ends. They're free to work for a competitor for the next 8 hours if they choose. May be in CA, but many part of the world this is not true. >Only executives might owe undivided loyalty, and even then that is a provision of the employment contract that must be explicitly negotiated and paid for by the employer. Which is exactly what is happening. He was only two or three level below Tim Cook.
- foobiekr 7y ago
  can you expand on the former point about recruiting? Non-solicit clauses in contracts are commonplace and I've never met someone in CA who doesn't think they have legitimacy. If he was dumb enough to directly solicit instead of making himself available for people to reach out to, if they chose to, that's on him. But I'd like to know if this is an invalid folk-belief.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    It's an invalid folk belief perpetuated by employers. In CA, soliciting your fellow employees is perfectly permissible. As of 2019, this is a blanket rule for all employees, including executives, because courts have determined that non-solicit clauses violates multiple CA labor laws (including the prohibition on non-competes). However, executives may be subject to non-compete clauses in their employment contract. Executives, as highly-compensated employees, are exempt from CA prohibitions on non-compete clauses. Solicitation activity might violate the non-compete if the executive is going into a new business that directly competes with the actual activities of the old employer, but as a practical matter this can't really occur since the executive couldn't take the new job until after the non-compete period ends.
  - geoelectric 7y ago
    ...except for everyone in CA who reads the news. https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/06/11/employee-nonsolicitation-clauses-are-not-enforceable-in-california/?slreturn=20191110172323 https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/06/11/employee-nonsolic... Edit: above was paywalled, and I didn't realize I was trial-viewing it. Think this is free for all: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5993e280-c03b-447c-8dcc-9895c2e963fc https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5993e280-c03b... They were only questionably enforceable before too, since they still amounted to a contract restriction limiting someone's employment opportunities (in this case, the person being recruited). While CA does codify non-competes (and now non-solicits) are void, general interpretation was that any restrictive contract clause wasn't going to fly in court except under very specific circumstances. CA takes a very dim view of restricting job mobility. Ethically, totally slack if he recruited while still employed, of course, and if he literally did it at work I suspect he'll run into a "using company resources (time, building, hipchat channel, etc)" issue, which is one of the things that severely weakens a defense that whatever you do yourself, you still own. No idea how or if that applies at a high-level action like starting a company, but if he had any technical contribution I could definitely see it coming up.
- briandear 7y ago
  > the second activity (recruiting) is explicitly not illegal as of 2019 > while employed at Apple That's the key. You can solicit after you aren't employed by the company. But that isn't the case here.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    No, you're misunderstanding the law. In CA it's always been legal to solicit employees after you left your old job. Recent court cases simply clarified that this has always been the case, and that the same law invalidating non-competes applies to non-solicits. And the 2019 case explicitly says that a non-solicit applying during the term of employment was illegal as a matter of CA law.

gamblor956 7y ago

Both of those activities are permissible under CA law, and the second activity (recruiting) is explicitly not illegal as of 2019... And Apple is not alleging violations of their IP. They are alleging that he learned non-Apple-IP things during his time at Apple and is now using that knowledge at his new company.

Despegar 7y ago
As far as I know there are no non-solicitation or non-compete agreements involved in this case at all. It all hinges on the fact that he was employed by Apple and owed them his undivided loyalty.
- sillysaurusx 7y ago
  Then I hope the case is thrown out. Companies have no loyalty to us. Why should we have loyalty to the company? Ah yes, because they have money and power. Sounds familiar. I think I get the argument – "how could society function if every employee were allowed to actively sabotage the company they worked for?" – I just don't buy it. Most people have no interest in doing such things. The law of large numbers seems to guarantee it won't be a big problem in practice. And I'm more in the "Let employees have civil liberties" camp than "Let companies protect themselves from any conceivable harm." And besides, we have a clear remedy for employees who sabotage their companies: fire them. From a cursory reading, it sounds like this person used his technical expertise to go start a startup, and tried to recruit some of his peers to leave their cushy bigco job and go help him. Y'know who else did that? Shockley Semiconductor.
  - ratww 7y ago
    > Y'know who else did that? Shockley Semiconductor. Steve Jobs himself also recruited some folks from Apple when he left to found Next.
    - briandear 7y ago
      After he left. He didn't decide to start Next while at Apple using Apple resources with the intent to sell it back to Apple. That's a big difference.
      - ratww 7y ago
        Nope. "Over the previous six months, Jobs had kept in contact with some of the senior staff in the Macintosh division, even after Gassée took control. Five of these staffers agreed to become cofounders of the new company with Jobs. Chief among these were Bud Tribble, Susan Barnes, and Dan’l Lewin." [1] "After several months of being sidelined, Jobs resigned from Apple on September 13, 1985. He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him." [2] He also intended on licensing the tech to Apple, according to those sources. [1] https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triumphant-return-apple/ https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT
        ksec 7y ago
        Well I read this as more of an agreement to your OP rather than disagree. He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him and He also intended on licensing the tech to Apple, according to those sources. i.e The board were both acknowledged and have a common interest.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  It all hinges on the fact that he was employed by Apple and owed them his undivided loyalty. Employees do not owe their employers their undivided loyalty. The lowest-level employees don't owe their employer anything when their shift ends. They're free to work for a competitor for the next 8 hours if they choose. Salaried employees generally don't owe their employer anything once they leave the office and stop work for the day...though only in a few states like CA are workers granted explicit protections for their extracurricular ventures. Only executives might owe undivided loyalty, and even then that is a provision of the employment contract that must be explicitly negotiated and paid for by the employer.
  - ksec 7y ago
    >The lowest-level employees don't owe their employer anything when their shift ends. They're free to work for a competitor for the next 8 hours if they choose. May be in CA, but many part of the world this is not true. >Only executives might owe undivided loyalty, and even then that is a provision of the employment contract that must be explicitly negotiated and paid for by the employer. Which is exactly what is happening. He was only two or three level below Tim Cook.
foobiekr 7y ago
can you expand on the former point about recruiting? Non-solicit clauses in contracts are commonplace and I've never met someone in CA who doesn't think they have legitimacy. If he was dumb enough to directly solicit instead of making himself available for people to reach out to, if they chose to, that's on him. But I'd like to know if this is an invalid folk-belief.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  It's an invalid folk belief perpetuated by employers. In CA, soliciting your fellow employees is perfectly permissible. As of 2019, this is a blanket rule for all employees, including executives, because courts have determined that non-solicit clauses violates multiple CA labor laws (including the prohibition on non-competes). However, executives may be subject to non-compete clauses in their employment contract. Executives, as highly-compensated employees, are exempt from CA prohibitions on non-compete clauses. Solicitation activity might violate the non-compete if the executive is going into a new business that directly competes with the actual activities of the old employer, but as a practical matter this can't really occur since the executive couldn't take the new job until after the non-compete period ends.
- geoelectric 7y ago
  ...except for everyone in CA who reads the news. https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/06/11/employee-nonsolicitation-clauses-are-not-enforceable-in-california/?slreturn=20191110172323 https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/06/11/employee-nonsolic... Edit: above was paywalled, and I didn't realize I was trial-viewing it. Think this is free for all: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5993e280-c03b-447c-8dcc-9895c2e963fc https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5993e280-c03b... They were only questionably enforceable before too, since they still amounted to a contract restriction limiting someone's employment opportunities (in this case, the person being recruited). While CA does codify non-competes (and now non-solicits) are void, general interpretation was that any restrictive contract clause wasn't going to fly in court except under very specific circumstances. CA takes a very dim view of restricting job mobility. Ethically, totally slack if he recruited while still employed, of course, and if he literally did it at work I suspect he'll run into a "using company resources (time, building, hipchat channel, etc)" issue, which is one of the things that severely weakens a defense that whatever you do yourself, you still own. No idea how or if that applies at a high-level action like starting a company, but if he had any technical contribution I could definitely see it coming up.
briandear 7y ago
> the second activity (recruiting) is explicitly not illegal as of 2019 > while employed at Apple That's the key. You can solicit after you aren't employed by the company. But that isn't the case here.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  No, you're misunderstanding the law. In CA it's always been legal to solicit employees after you left your old job. Recent court cases simply clarified that this has always been the case, and that the same law invalidating non-competes applies to non-solicits. And the 2019 case explicitly says that a non-solicit applying during the term of employment was illegal as a matter of CA law.