Intel Sues Oregon Engineer Who Left For Microsoft, Allegedly Taking Trade Secrets With Him (oregonlive.com) 32
Intel sued a former Oregon employee last week, alleging he took trade secrets with him when he bolted for Microsoft and used the information to gain an advantage in subsequent business negotiations with Intel. From a report: The engineer, Varun Gupta, worked for Intel for a decade before leaving for Microsoft in January 2020, according to the suit. He allegedly loaded Intel trade secrets onto two USB drives before quitting and later accessed them on his Microsoft-issued laptop. Gupta could not immediately be reached for comment.
Intel and Microsoft are longtime partners and, increasingly, rivals as Microsoft develops its own chip engineering capabilities. Microsoft is preparing to open a big new engineering hub in Hillsboro, near Intel's Oregon research factories, and has hired a former Intel vice president to help lead it. In this case, though, the litigation indicates Intel and Microsoft worked together to investigate the incident. Intel's complaint claims that Gupta had denied knowing where the one of the USB drives was, but later turned it over to Microsoft for analysis. He claimed to have discarded a second USB drive that allegedly contained Intel secrets, according to the litigation. The suit asserts that Microsoft determined Gupta had plugged the USB drives into his Microsoft-issued laptop. "In his new role at Microsoft, Gupta used the confidential information and trade secrets he misappropriated from Intel, deploying that information in head-to-head negotiations with Intel concerning customized product design and pricing for significant volumes of Xeon processors," Intel alleged in Friday's filing.
Intel and Microsoft are longtime partners and, increasingly, rivals as Microsoft develops its own chip engineering capabilities. Microsoft is preparing to open a big new engineering hub in Hillsboro, near Intel's Oregon research factories, and has hired a former Intel vice president to help lead it. In this case, though, the litigation indicates Intel and Microsoft worked together to investigate the incident. Intel's complaint claims that Gupta had denied knowing where the one of the USB drives was, but later turned it over to Microsoft for analysis. He claimed to have discarded a second USB drive that allegedly contained Intel secrets, according to the litigation. The suit asserts that Microsoft determined Gupta had plugged the USB drives into his Microsoft-issued laptop. "In his new role at Microsoft, Gupta used the confidential information and trade secrets he misappropriated from Intel, deploying that information in head-to-head negotiations with Intel concerning customized product design and pricing for significant volumes of Xeon processors," Intel alleged in Friday's filing.
Rogue engineer (Score:2)
Microsoft looks to be about to throw this guy under the bus to keep things chill with Intel. There are likely significant strategic covenants on the table. Oh, and I could spell that "Intel" or "intel". Just say'n.
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Microsoft looks to be about to throw this guy under the bus to keep things chill with Intel. There are likely significant strategic covenants on the table. Oh, and I could spell that "Intel" or "intel". Just say'n.
From the article, if he really did download documents of company servers on his last day, then that is just really stupid. Even if it turns out those documents aren't protectable trade secrets, it's just really stupid. Anything on your company PC, even todo lists you might have typed up, is owned by the company, not you, and if you're leaving you don't have a right to appropriate them without permission.
Even in my own business, I have always used a computer that I own personally so that the delineation of c
And this ladies and gentlemen is why (Score:4, Informative)
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Unless someone at Microsoft asked him to break the law or someone at Microsoft knew he broke the law and ignored it.. can't blame the large corporation for his illegal activities.
How is it possible for a knowledge worker (Score:2)
I'm saying this represents a fundamental break in the system. It's practically impossible to sell your labor at that point. You can take a 1-3 year vacation but by then your skills are rusty and nobody'll hire you.
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If he helped design the chip architecture and Microsoft hired him for that expertise, no issue. If he brought along documents to show how Intel was doing it.. now you're crossing the line.
I'm not one to defend big business... but you have to be able to have some sort of protection of information. You can't prohibit knowledge or experience from leaving, but you can prohibit files and phy
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The documents are one thing, but if you created the documents, you still know what was in them. You might not be able to sit down and re-create them word for word, but you know what was in them. Some people probably CAN just type them out of memory, word for word.
That's why at one time the social contract was employment for life, then you get a nice pension. Job hopping was disloyalty and so, suspect. Now employers downsize, rightsize, capsize, etc at the drop of a hat and somehow expect proprietary knowled
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You're approaching splitting a frog's hair in a case where the document is your own personal notes. Some people can memorize the whole notebook. Some only need the notebook as a reminder. Others who have a neurological impairment must use notes as a sort of prosthetic memory. There is ongoing work to enhance memory with brain implants (admittedly in VERY early stages) for those who have a neurological impairment.
In other contexts, one's smartphone is seen as an extension of one's own private thoughts and re
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to *not* take trade secrets when they get a new job? How does somebody who's stock in trade is knowledge every leave their current job (assuming they're anything more than a low paid, easily replaceable flunky)?
I'm not sure the current state of things, but when I looked into this a few years back it was pretty clear that in most jurisdictions the distinction was that anything you 'remembered' was not a trade secret. The most common examples were around sales staff and their customer contact list - you could contact customers that you knew from your previous job, but you couldn't write a list of their phone numbers down (note that this is separate from a more specific restraint of trade that is commonly signed to p
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Well, you have to be careful.
First, the guy probably was covered under NDAs, protecting
Re:How is it possible for a knowledge worker (Score:4, Insightful)
How is it possible?
You could just not "load Intel trade secrets onto two USB drives before quitting and later accessed them on his Microsoft-issued laptop."
Just don't use your last day to steal as much as you can. That'll pretty much keep you legally safe.
If you also want to be ethical, which engenders the trust of those you work with, you can think about "is this a secret?" before you share specific information.
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He loaded up drives with gigabytes of "knowledge" that is how.
You can't see the issue here?
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Individuals are incapable of not "load[ing] Intel trade secrets onto two USB drives before quitting and later accessed them on his Microsoft-issued laptop"?
Funny, I've managed to not do that for every job I've ever had.
Heck, I even managed to tell my then-boss that no, we aren't interested in using the documents he kept from an old employer, bragging that he had lied when he told the previous company that he had deleted them.
I'm pretty sure you are also capable of not being a crook.
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Way to conveniently place the blame on the wrong player. What you will actually see just how the market actually corrects this bad behavior by the individual by correctly applying a fines and charges. He did something he should not have by actually making a concerted effort to put a flash drive into a computer and forcibly copy files he should not have.
Ever notice that the people who have an axe to grind against capitalism are the same people that also fall under in the under-productive side of the curve? W
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Ayn Rand's fundamental error is buying into the hype that some titan of industry (Atlas if you will) single handedly does some great thing ignoring the great many that tiol in obscurity to make the thing actually happen.
The rest of her errors grow from that fundamental error.
Her error is just the common error of mistaking leadership with virtue taken to the extreme.
The fundamental error in most flavors of Communism is belief that the leader can be entirely replaced with a committee (and yet, somehow the lea
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Ayn Rand ended up dying on the dole. She's an extreme case. Communism has never been tried. Communism would look more like the Star Trek universe than Stalinism etc.
Besides that, yes it is all bullshit.
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Communism has absolutely been tried, many times. The problem is that it runs so contrary to human nature and reality itself that it cannot work as advertised. It can only be a totalitarian dictatorship. That is why every attempt at implementation immediately becomes a Stalinist or Maoist dictatorship.
And the one and only reason Star Trek is so utopian (b
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OTOH, in our society even where we actually have eliminated scarcity, we have artificial scarcity in the form of intellectual property. Where technological advances have cut cost of production to a tenth of what it once was, prices remain high. Where we multiply the productivity of everyone, the savings all accrue to the capitalist.
I'm certainly not claiming that Soviet style Communism is better, but it is clear that Capitalism as currently implemented needs a lot of fixing.
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I think what you mean is "Laissez-faire", which is an approach to, or a guiding philosophy for, Capitalism. As an implementation of Capitalism it would be absur
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Unfortunately, what we have instead is just the obverse side of Animal Farm. We still have some people more equal than others, only the set of more equal people has changed.
How? You might ask (Score:5, Interesting)
The old trick I used was to place a white image somewhere randomly in my document but loaded from a remote url. When the document is opened, the url would be called. Now I have forensic info on the person who opened my file. I filter out known ip addresses and when a file is hit, I look at that referenced file and then go through audit logs to see who is on that list.
Now thereâ(TM)s versioning tricks and other methods I used to narrow down the user, but donâ(TM)t think you are safe pulling a document from a share drive or cloud drive or even git repos and reusing that data at your next job. You can be tracked.
This subject is more interesting than the lawsuit. (Score:2)
Fascinating post but I'm without mod points.
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The old trick I used was to place a white image somewhere randomly in my document but loaded from a remote url.
This trick does work. However, the truly paranoid will open the files with no network connection.
Man bites dog (Score:2)
Intel sues a dude going over to Microsoft?
Intel, Microsoft, aren't they the same company? I mean in a functional sense? Wintel, anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Why don't we also sue Intel? (Score:1)
Why don't we also sue Intel?
Their processors have consistently had flaws in them for years. They release microcode updates to address these flaws, which slow down the operation of processors we paid money for.
Flawed by design. Not held accountable.
Too many Guptas (Score:2)
So, he worked for the State of Oregon? (Score:2)
Re: So, he worked for the State of Oregon? (Score:2)
No, thatâ(TM)s *not* what the headline says - unless you are a moron.