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> No serious company would do the latter It happens literally all the time: [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/27/anthony-levandowski-google-

• beardedwizard 3y ago
  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.
  • mcpackieh 3y ago
    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. Point is, shit that shouldn't happen routinely does happen anyway. "That wouldn't happen because it would be illegal" is generally bullshit.
    • juunpp 3y ago
      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 of copyright notices (the individual's fault), or the source code was just sitting on their laptop and never acted upon, etc. So I think the question (and I'm not a lawyer...) is whether Nvidia conducted such audit and to what extent (if any) the other company's source code was merged into theirs (versus just sitting on the laptop).
      • KeplerBoy 3y ago
        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.
        • juunpp 3y ago
          The article mentions the directory containing the files was still named as it was in Valeo. If he didn't bother renaming the path, I'm not sure he bothered removing the copyright.
  • swores 3y ago
    > "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.