Robocar Tech Biz Sues Nvidia, Claims Stolen Code Shared In Teams Meeting Blunder

Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Nvidia is facing legal action in the U.S. for theft of trade secrets from a German automotive company, which alleges its ex-employee made an epic blunder of showing something he shouldn't have when minimizing a Powerpoint slide at a joint Microsoft Teams meeting both companies were attending. The automotive firm, Valeo Schalter und Sensoren, claims the flashing of its source code for the assisted parking app on the call is evidence to support its accusations that the ex-staffer stole the IP before leaving to join Nvidia. The two tech companies were both on the call as they were each suppliers on contract for a parking and driving assistance project with a major automotive OEM that was not named in the suit. Under the terms of the contract with the OEM, the suit states, engineers from both Valeo and Nvidia had to schedule collaboration meetings so that "Nvidia employees could ask Valeo employees questions about Valeo's ultrasonic hardware and data associated with the hardware."

The complaint [PDF], filed by Valeo in the US District Court for Northern California, goes on to allege misappropriation of trade secrets by Nvidia, through which the company claims the GPU-maker attempted to take a shortcut into the automotive marketplace by using its stolen software. Nvidia is a relative newcomer to the automotive market, introducing its Nvidia Drive platform at the CES trade show in 2015. Valeo says that it only discovered the theft during a conference call on March 8, 2022 between its engineers and those of Nvidia to collaborate on work for an automotive OEM, a customer of both companies. Valeo develops automotive hardware such as cameras and sensors, in addition to software to processes the data from the hardware. The court filing states that Valeo previously provided the OEM in question with both hardware and software for its autonomous vehicle technology, but in this instance, it asked Valeo to provide ultrasonic hardware only. For the software side, the OEM instead chose Nvidia. One of the Nvidia engineers on the call, named as Mohammad Moniruzzaman, was a former employee of Valeo, and during the call, made using Microsoft's Teams software, he shared his screen in order to give a presentation containing questions for the Valeo participants.

Yet also visible on his screen after the presentation finished - or so the complaint alleges - was a window of source code, which the Valeo participants recognized as belonging to their company. According to the filing, one of the Valeo engineers succeeded in capturing a screenshot as evidence. According to Valeo, the source code file names that were allegedly visible in the screenshot were identical to those used in its source code, and it also claims the source code appeared to be identical to proprietary code maintained in Valeo's repositories. The company says in the suit that it then conducted a comprehensive internal forensic IT audit, and alleges it discovered that Moniruzzaman had copied four repositories containing the code for Valeo's parking and driving assistance software, prior to leaving the company in May 2021. [...] The claim is that Valeo's source code and documentation has been used in the development of Nvidia's software, and this provided the GPU giant and its engineers with a shortcut in the development of its parking assistance code, saving Nvidia perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs.

According to the court filing, Nvidia said it removed Moniruzzaman's additions to its code. However, those additions underwent "a peer review process of 10-30 iterations of feedback loops" before the code was fully merged into Nvidia's database. Valeo contends that this process of extensive edits by others means it is not realistic that Nvidia could have fully remove Moniruzzaman's contributions. Valeo claims it has suffered competitive harm as a result of Nvidia's action and as a result is seeking damages, to be determined at trial, as well as an injunction prohibiting Nvidia or its employees from using or disclosing Valeo's trade secrets. A date for jury trial has yet to be announced.

Nvidia knew what they were doing

[spazmonkey]

Someone doesn't just show up from a competing firm and claim to have written years worth of identical software to theirs in his spare time. Nvidia knew exactly whose code they were using.
Sounds like they deserve to burn.

Re:Nvidia knew what they were doing

[Anubis IV]

Someone doesn't just show up from a competing firm and claim to have written years worth of identical software to theirs in his spare time. Nvidia knew exactly whose code they were using.

Hiring someone who worked for a competitor doesn’t mean or even suggest that you expect them to deliver the competition’s code. Fast track your work? Sure, because they know how to solve the problem already. Guidance to steer you clear of pitfalls because they have the experience and knowledge that comes from living through hard-won victories? Sure. But having your competitor’s code in yours is a massive liability for exactly the sorts of reasons we’re seeing here. I sincerely doubt Nvidia had any awareness of it, though if he was delivering results surprisingly fast that should’ve been setting off alarms.

Re:

[evil_aaronm]

Yep. We brought on board some guy to take over part of the stuff I was doing, so I was involved in the code reviews he held. He didn't even bother to remove the previous company's copyright from things. WTF? I wasn't a manager, but I knew that that was flat out wrong, and a liability, so I said something along the lines of, "We can't use stuff taken from your previous employer: it's their property." He got all pissy and copied it pretty much verbatim in a different language. His actual manager never s

Re:

[quantaman]

Someone doesn't just show up from a competing firm and claim to have written years worth of identical software to theirs in his spare time. Nvidia knew exactly whose code they were using.

Hiring someone who worked for a competitor doesn’t mean or even suggest that you expect them to deliver the competition’s code. Fast track your work? Sure, because they know how to solve the problem already. Guidance to steer you clear of pitfalls because they have the experience and knowledge that comes from living through hard-won victories? Sure. But having your competitor’s code in yours is a massive liability for exactly the sorts of reasons we’re seeing here. I sincerely doubt Nvidia had any awareness of it, though if he was delivering results surprisingly fast that should’ve been setting off alarms.

This sounds right. I know a few co-workers who took the codebase with them when they left, generally because they wanted to reference previous bits code they had written, sometimes because they'd spent several years building it and felt slightly attached.

I'm guessing this guy did the same, except he seems to have been using it as a reference for his new job building similar software (hopefully without his team knowing). I'm sure it happens but it's a big no-no and now at the very least his new (and soon to

Re:

[monkeyxpress]

Someone doesn't just show up from a competing firm and claim to have written years worth of identical software to theirs in his spare time. Nvidia knew exactly whose code they were using. Sounds like they deserve to burn.

I really doubt this. It's a huge existential risk to their program knowingly allowing stolen code into their system. Also, it's highly doubtful this is code that is so magical that they couldn't replicate it - so what you're really talking about is risking massive lawsuits and injunctions to avoid hiring a couple more developers. Also, developers don't get paid enough to be involved in career ending activities, so the likelihood of them being able to keep it a secret is very low. Companies can be dumb but n

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Depends if he presented it to them, or if he just pretended to be working at normal speed while copy/pasting the old code in.

Re: Nvidia knew what they were doing

[guruevi]

I think with generative AI for code these days this will become increasingly difficult to prove. If you ask it the same questions, you will get the same or similar enough code, moreover it can learn from your past code whether that is public or not (as long as it is within reach of eg. Microsoft for OpenAI/GitHub CoPilot or Meta for Lllama).

Given the style of questions depends on the individual and not the project owner, the likelihood that you get the same code for similar projects is very high. All nVIDIA

Window sharing vs. screen sharing

[orion205]

If you want to present over Teams, just share the Powerpoint window, rather than your desktop screen. This was a costly mistake for Nvidia. They almost got away with it!

Re:

[thegarbz]

That works well if all you share is one window. In many cases your sharing session needs to jump between applications. Nothing is more annoying than waiting for someone to fumble through their Teams settings to change application.

Better idea: Clean your desktop when presenting outside the company. There's many reasons you should be closing your work during a presentation, or at least at a minimum firing up another virtual desktop.

Re:

[gweihir]

Just requires one mis-click to fail. The only sane thing is to not even have stuff like that on your computer when using Teams.

Maybe software shouldn't be patentable, eh?

[OneOfMany07]

It's not possible to truly know who creates what (even in the same company, let alone between them).

If I'm used to certain names, I'd probably recreate the same structure at the new employer. And if someone knew a product well then might they recreate the same code at the next employer too?

Do I know what's going on there? No...

But it's hard to imagine NVIDIA would do this on purpose. They've spent a ton of time and money already in that area, with it hard to imagine any perceived benefit to poaching the

Re:

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

This would be more of a question of copyright, not patent. It's highly likely that all of Valeo's source code has a copyright at the top of every source file. Any competent company developing original code would have such a process.

The guy who left and took the code to NVIDIA would have violated that copyright. Seeing the code at NVIDIA, the Valeo people saw that the copyright had been violated.

Re:

[pegr]

It’s always easier (and better) to write the same code a second time. You cannot lay claim to the IP in someone’s noggin.

Re:

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

These sorts of meetings are usually recorded. No one slapped the screenshot button at just the right moment on a live call.

So, let's see... you're the defendant and you're going to claim in court that you left your old company to a competitor doing the same thing in a different system yet used the same file name structure and your code looked exactly like the code you were supposed to leave behind. And you're the only person in the new company working on this critical project so no one else there would ha

Re:

[christoban]

The screenshot thing could easily just a slight case of Chinese whispers, and just having the code open suggests he was at least using it as a reference.

Valeo's case is very strong.

Re:

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

Yeah looking bad for the N guys on this one. Unless something new comes out in court they're in a pretty bad way right now.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

And "just so happened to get a screenshot"? Really? This is what you're going to claim? "No, I wasn't trying to record anything of a competitor's system to steal something... I happened to find them stealing from me!"

You’re suggesting that there was something outlandish or nefarious at play here, but the call was likely being recorded anyway if it was anything like these sorts of calls that I’ve been on. Moreover, I frequently grab screenshots during Zoom calls any time something unexpected flashes up on the screen. I’ve caught vendors trying to sneak critical details by us and our clients, been able to maintain team productivity when facing bureaucracies that are slow to get me access to the data I

Re:

[thegarbz]

But it's hard to imagine NVIDIA would do this on purpose.

Irrelevant. NVIDIA needs to vet their people and have a corporate culture in place that doesn't promote the use of outside IP. The buck stops with them, even if this employee "went rogue" by stealing from his previous employer.

That part is not in dispute.

[Ecuador]

Moniruzzaman, when questioned by the German police, admitted to stealing Valeo’s software and using the code while employed at Nvidia, according to the court filing. The filing adds that he was convicted in Germany for unlawful acquisition, use and disclosure of Valeo’s trade secrets in September this year.

So, the events of the call are not in question. He had the code on his screen, participants saw it before he did and took a screenshot so he later admitted it. He had source code open and directory structure included everything like ValeoDocs etc.

What is in question is that Nvidia claims that afterwards they removed his contributions. Obviously, as all of us working in big software projects know, that's not exactly doable if it's someone who's been part of our team working for a while...

One slide. Really?

[Required Snark]

This smells a whole lot like an extortion attempt, with a side order of competitive advantage. Settle out of court, get some cash and access to NVIDIA tech. Also publicity and some marketing BS: we're so hot NVIDIA steals from us. And access to NVIDA code, which will never ever leak from the lawyers back to the code monkeys. Never.

Will anyone report the out of court settlement on Slashdot, or is that not sexy enough? Asking for a friend.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

You really should read the story. Nvidia didn't steal anything. It was a Nvidia employee who copied repos from his previous employer.

According to Valeo, the source code file names that were allegedly visible in the screenshot were identical to those used in its source code, and it also claims the source code appeared to be identical to proprietary code maintained in Valeo's repositories. The company says in the suit that it then conducted a comprehensive internal forensic IT audit, and alleges it discovered

Re:

[hoofie]

Very large German companies don't go in for extortion.

It's beyond dispute that NVidia hired someone who was found guilty of stealing proprietary code from Valeo.

The courts will decide whether NVidia gained any advantage.

Very large companies tend to be VERY protective of their IP and any sniff of IP theft.

Re:

[Required Snark]

Volkswagen emissions scandal [wikipedia.org]

Hahahah, too stupid to use Teams!

[gweihir]

Really, have something stolen open on the same desktop when doing a Teams meeting with the people you stole it from? How utterly incapable do you have to be for that? I would not even put stuff like that on the same machine. Or Internet-reachable in any way.