Well, they do have an employee monitoring system, at least at the device level. After all, that seems to be how they found the evidence for their claims. As for “doing a better job interviewing”, someone unthread pointed out that, if you dangle an appetizing enough carrot in front of most people, they’d do something like this. There’s the old expression “Every man has his price”. While some people can’t be bought off and some people have a moral sense strong enough to call out the recruiting firm for soliciting trade secrets, in reality, most people confronted with this would probably think something like “that’s an awful lot of money they’re promising, that sure would be nice. I don’t know about this downloading data business, but it seems to be legal, otherwise the new firm wouldn’t be asking me to do it”. The recruiter at Rivos may well have been putting additional pressure, or maybe there was a bounty system with an especially sweet reward.
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Apple Sues SoC Startup Rivos for Poaching Employees and Stealing Trade Secrets
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Wow! I'm glad they were caught. Stealing trade secrets is a huge deal.
Well, poaching employees is not a crime. Stealing confidential information and trade secrets and take this information to another company is.
No it's not. Stealing confidential information and trade secrets is a crime. And is punished by law.
Since the 1990s, theft of trade secrets has also been a federal crime. They could end up in Leavenworth.
Many of the engineers at Apple saw their work on the M1 lineup as a career maker. Startups with VC money are going to offer stupid options to them to get them to leave. Arguably the M-Series core architecture is done and the Engineers don't want to sit on their butts while their careers are super hot. The goal of working at Apple was to work on an epic project and then be "rockstar engineers".. so now they want to be the bosses where they were just employees before. Apple has tens of thousands of engineers employed... they're never going to get those opportunities at Apple.
But yeah, Apple monitors the heck out of their work computers. This is one of those prime examples of keeping your personal stuff off your work computer. Including personal emails, calendars, photos, etc. Apple is gonna rightfully claim all the data on the compis theirs. Apple doesn't really care if someone downloaded 390GB of music and photos and 9 GB of work related data like personal emails. they're gonna sue the poachers anyway. This is a classic startup mistake to not "firewall" their new employees between jobs because now the startups whole project is compromised with merely the accusations that individual employees kept their Apple work products after leaving. Now Apple has put the VC funding in jeopardy because they're going to bully these guys in court for a settlement.
Big difference in poaching engineers and soliciting former coworkers to commit corporate espionage and steal data to bring to work at the new job using those designs tO complete with said employer.
The sad part is some here think that’s ok like these guy. This is why the remote full time was never going to happen.
Asking for a royalty settlement at the VC startup stage is just a nicer way of going after a death sentence. This immediately becomes a boat anchor on every other IP deal and purchase offer that they EVER make. The accusation is contagious like the plague and will follow them for decades.
Remember the BS Steve got when he was sued over the "Apple" name way back in the beginning.. this is the same thing.
How unethical and disgusting of a person you have to be to try to pull something like this.
No, this is the Valley "bro" culture game in a nutshell. You work for big tech and they move you to super expensive cost of living area... but they'll offer you free iPhone, free computer, free iCloud account, free lunches, childcare, barbershop, etc. now you try to leave. They "own" all of it. All your personal info is mixed up on work devices because that's what the company sells for the job. Once you leave they claim impropriety over every little thing... if they feel like it. Just to remind you that they own you.
I don’t see how you are making a correlation between customer and corporate devices. No matter how many times you look under your bed, the boogie man is not there.
Steve Jobs was sued by Apple for poaching engineers from Apple to Next.
In fact, it's fair game in California, where many provisions of Non-Compete agreements are invalid. So Apple didn't get anything from Next, until they purchased it.
Big difference hiring an engineer than hiring an engineer who also brings all of your designs on a disk with them.
Theft of trade secrets occurs when someone knowingly steals or misappropriates a trade secret to the economic benefit of anyone other than the owner. Similarly, economic espionage occurs when a trade secret is stolen for the benefit of a foreign government, foreign instrumentality, or foreign agent. Both crimes are covered by the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, Title 18, Sections 1831 and 1832 of the U.S. Code.
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I think that working from home facilitated the IP theft, this reads like a spy novel or a geek movie script.
It’s not that simple.
You can have proprietary knowledge in your mind without relying upon documentation. It is still not permissible to be using that proprietary knowledge of your previous company in work you do for a new employer. (Unless you’ve been given permission to do so).
That they left such obvious evidence of their (alleged) theft of information just makes the case against them stronger.
It would be a similar situation if we were talking about classified information. You can transmit such information verbally and having knowledge of such information is equivalent to having the documents themselves.
(edited to add “alleged”)
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The complaint is not that the employees left for Rivos, it's not even that they took large amount if Apple IP with them (though that would be grounds for complaint); it's that Rivos is using that Apple IP.
My guess is that Apple have extremely sophisticated simulations of their SoCs. They seem to do an extremely good job of knowing how to size various structures, and being able to rapidly test new micro-architectural ideas. And the simulations seem to cover the entire SoC, given that it's not just the CPU but the whole kit and kaboodle (ISP, VPU, NPU, GPU, memory controller, etc) that all advance in lock-step every year.
These sorts of simulators are
(a) worth their weight in gold
(b) basically impossible to find, rent, buy. You have to build them from scratch. Of course there are academic simulators, but they are limited in scope and performance.
Of course there's much else that could have been taken. But simulators are the best in that you could use them to design better chips without obviously raising any flags about either copyright or patent infringement, as would be the case it you used more obvious IP like the actual SoC designs.
MR writers jumped the gun a bit!
A similar error seems to underlie several of the comments!
”The employees who stole information allegedly used USB drives and AirDrop to offload sensitive Apple material to their own personal devices, as well as stealing presentations on unreleased SoCs and saving it to their cloud accounts.”
”allegedly“ is in the wrong place! ❌ Or, is MR now judge and jury? ?A similar error seems to underlie several of the comments!