Legal Arguments Can Hurt Tech Job Mobility 255
camelcai writes "Microsoft's suit against Kai-Fu Lee and Google is based off of the thought that in some circumstances people can't avoid sharing or relying on trade secrets from their former employer when moving to a competitor. In MS's filing it says: 'Lee's conduct threatens to disclose or Lee inevitably will disclose Microsoft's trade secrets to Google and/or others for his and/or Google's financial gain in the course of working to improve Google search products that compete with Microsoft, and in the course of establishing and building Google's presence in China to compete with Microsoft's efforts in China.' According to CNET, thanks to this increasingly popular legal argument, defectors might face a lawsuit even if they did not sign agreements not to compete or not to disclose confidential information."
I beg your pardon? (Score:2, Interesting)
Can someone translate this please?
Simple solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anything less is indentured servitude (a form of slavery).
If the companies want to play that game, then they should be financially responsible.
Jennifer Government (Score:5, Interesting)
Here, we have a company suing over potential losses in intellectual property which might result an employee leaving their job.
You tell me which is more surreal.
The future, is.... now?
Whats good for the goose (Score:5, Interesting)
Severance as long as non-disclosure? (Score:5, Interesting)
Say you work in search engine technology for Microsoft, how are you going to earn a nice living elsewhere? Afterall your skill is searches and that's what people are willing to pay for. Well if your employer wants to prevent you from earning a decent living, it should pay for it!
I am sure that there is a flaw in that argument, and I understand Microsoft's position in the matter but in these circumstances doesn't it make the employee a virtual slave of the employer if he can't use his skills elswhere?
Competing to trade with the devil (Score:5, Interesting)
When I think of how China treats the Tibetans and Uhigurs, I just can't believe that we let companies like Microsoft and Google trade with them. The scary part about this competition to build up their services in China is that regardless of which company wins, the Chinese government wins because its private and state-owned corporations get a much larger economy to profit from. That in turn goes into building up the military, which btw they are now making steady progress toward having a blue water navy in the pacific.
I was a juror... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm of the opinion that what is in your head is yours, and makes you what you are. As no one can own you, in part or in whole, they can't own what's in your head. They can only share in it. Your life experiences are your own, and no one elses.
Trade secrets must be acknowledged as temporary artifices at best. As the pirates say, two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.
= 9J =
Been there, done that (Score:2, Interesting)
Employees at will can quit or be fired at any time, and there are a lot of precedents (esp in CA tech industy cases) that say that what's in your head is yours, unless you signed it away via non-disclosure agreements or employment contracts.
However, you can't take physical stuff with you (like code listings or customer lists) and you can't conspire with cow-orkers to leave en masse. (I did the latter but the employer's lawyer was too incompetent to prove it - they never thought to ask). And patent laws, copyrights and trade secret laws still apply.
Re:Simple solution. (Score:5, Interesting)
About 15 years ago, I knew one engineer at the Johnson Space Center area who accepted early retirement from IBM division there and accepted a job with another NASA contractor on a project that was not in competition with IBM. The terms of his early retirement agreement specified that he could not work for another company in competition with IBM.
IBM nixed that about two weeks after his retirement and before he started at the other job. Their reasoning was that they might want to bid on that contract later and he would then be violating the terms of his agreement.
A lawsuit with IBM to enforce his rights would have ended his retirement plan with IBM as well.
It really left him in a bind for quite a while.
A solution like yours would have helped him enormously.
Sounds like a job for Hiro Protagonist (Score:2, Interesting)
(I can't remember the names right now)
Free market labor (Score:4, Interesting)
"Well then maybe you should've made him not want to leave."
I find it amusing that companies are allowed to fuck employees in the race for cheaper labor, but valuable employees [alledgedly] aren't allowed to fuck employers in the race for higher wages.
Re:Competing to trade with the devil (Score:5, Interesting)
One can argue about a correlation between the health of an economy and the size of their urban centers, especially as far as consumer spending goes. China's urban centers alone stand at 300 million and counting. It's a fucking awesome mass of people just entering the first world economy. The Chinese are known to be excellent at saving cash; I read something about car companies salivating to get into the market because an overwhelming percentage of cars are purchased with cash (their banking system sucks, another chink in the armor).
I agree with all of the human rights concerns, etc., but they embody a critical mass that cannot be ignored.
someone posted something about them being unable to feed themselves. They can't power themselves either. I can imagine the war *cough* middle east destabilization efforts *cough* is a preemptive attempt to prevent consolidation and collusion efforts in the middle east with the chinese.
All in all, they can't be ignored. We're fucked both ways. I'm learning mandarin.
Oh, and to get on the topic: how is it possible that this Lee guy not ever disclose trade secrets. It's impossible. Not only that, but he's a well educated Chinese man who well serves as a frontman for a company attempting to woo the Chinese government into allowing them egress. There is so much more at stake with this lawsuit. If google establishes a significant foothold in that market, microsoft might be done. Wow. Like, they could really be done. A suite of server side applications for free, serving two billion people (their current penetration plus the chinese market) - OS agnostic. Then an OS like Linux can thrive - Google can even champion its own distribution - for free of course - that integrates all of its server side apps directly on a clean GUI - right on the desktop. It not only puts Microsoft in a quandary - but it wipes out a significant segment of the industry in one fell swoop. It's the commoditization of software - and a monopoly on information and the potential for relationships. Shit.
Guess that money spent on PHDs was well spent.
Sorry for the ramble.
Re:The new serfdom (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't just have to look to the future for this - you can look to the past also. What we see existing in potential here are similar to the medieval guilds. European guilds in the middle ages were very protective of their areas of expertise and raised Hell for outsiders who dared to compete (assuming they got access to the knowledge and skills they needed in the first place).
The modern view of the guilds tends to be very critical - they stopped people earning a living unless they were members?"
However, it's very similar to the situation that this would logically lead to - locked into a profession; and Heaven help you if you loose your place in the organization because with this sort of legal precedent, the threat of being sacked from a corporation becomes even more powerful.
For those who are interested in the guilds in history, it might be worth noting the following:
Re:Maybe Google gets the short end of this stick (Score:3, Interesting)
Does Google really want to hire someone this stupid?
Alternatively, this sounds like a red herring on Microsoft's part. If they want to know what mail Dr. Lee received, just get it out of their Exchange servers. They probably don't want to admit that they already do this.
mov(shoe, other_foot) (Score:3, Interesting)
When will this work? The next time the job market becomes tight in tech.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I beg your pardon? (Score:3, Interesting)
He hasn't done it yet.
He may never do it.
But because he could possibly do it sometime in the unknowable future he's screwed now for life for working for any company other than the one he just left.
It's called: Trying to prove a negative.
This is what happens in a brain share economy (Score:3, Interesting)
We've outsourced most of our manufacturing other countries, so now companies are going collectively insane trying to protect their brain share products whether it's music, movies, software or patentable ideas. This is just extending that protectionist mind set to the employees who think up the ideas.
It's insane. And I'm afraid we're going to wake up in the middle of an economic Pearl Harbor depending on sales of products with no substance.
Re:Severance as long as non-disclosure? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The new serfdom: No, we are workers. (Score:2, Interesting)
The medical profession still maintains high wages in the US because of a perverse form of collective action: the medical guilds that prevent a bigger number of doctors to study at the universities (and the high cost of education too).
In the end, we are workers who sell their force of labor for a sallary. Dont come with the "innovation" argument because it's phony. We may dress like managers, not like the janitors; we may be called "middle class", we may work in offices instead of production lines; but the reality is that our place in the greater scheme of things is closer to the janitor and the workers than it is to the managers and big capitalists.
Historically, even with aaaall their flaws, unions and struggles (NOT elections!) have been the only way that workers have been able to defend their interests against the interests of the bosses.
But we techies believe that we are above that, we believe that we can solve everything individually. I have never in my life seen a group of developers demanding anything in the streets. This is just the beggining, they are already attacking us and we have our pants down.
Posting comments to a site is not an assembly. If you dont go out to the streets, anything that you do does not exist politically. That is if you are not one of the bosses or owners of the circus.
Our bosses are going to fuck us big (they have already started) and we have no way to defend ourselves.
Here, in front of the keyboard, we dont stand a chance; and that's exactly where we will stay as a group.
Idiots (Score:4, Interesting)
This happens all the time - you interview someplace and they, usually way out of site of the interviewee, find out about possible non-compete complications. If there are any, and I do mean any at all, there is no offer. Period.
Why would it work any other way? Is someone at Google just trying to spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove a point? Companies don't do this sort of thing unless there is a real reason behind it.
And no matter how good Lee is, he isn't worth this. There is another agenda here - and that is what the real story should be.