Gerard Williams III, a former top chip engineer at Apple has been hit with a breach-of-contract lawsuit that the Cupertino firm filed against him after he left the company and launched his own processor firm, Nuvia.
Attorneys for a former Apple Inc executive on Tuesday will try to convince a skeptical judge of a core tenet of tech startup culture – that employees can plan a competing venture while still in a job.
Apple’s lawsuit against a former chip executive-turned-rival will have implications for employees all over California who are considering striking out on their own and creating the startups that drive tech business and culture.
Apple filed the lawsuit in Santa Clara County Superior Court against Gerard Williams III, who left the company last year after more than nine years as chief architect for the custom processors that power iPhones and iPads to start Nuvia Inc, which is designing chips for servers…
Apple sued Williams in August, alleging that he breached an intellectual property agreement and a duty of loyalty to the company by planning his new startup while on company time at Apple, spending hours on the phone with colleagues who eventually joined the venture.
MacDailyNews Take: We can’t imagine that in any state, even California, it’s legal to use your time at a company to plan another. It’s certainly not morally right, even if ultimately deemed legal. Or perhaps Williams spent hours on the phone at Apple with colleagues who eventually joined Nuvia talking only about Apple processors, not the forthcoming Nuvia venture?
The MDN take is a purely corporatist one.
In no way am I advocating theft of company IP. What is confidential should remain confidential. But….
The company tries to own (lease) 100% of your talent, labor, and intellectual output. So if you are thinking about a problem at work during your Sunday in the park, why isn’t it immoral for the company to expect that from you?
The reason is that the company believes that all time is company time. Yet that’s not immoral.
I once had an employer that was coming around with non-competes, 7 years after I started with the company. It was completely one sided. 6 months, and at their discretion whether pay and benefits are extended, regardless of whether you quit or were fired. They also expected you to sign of your entire intellectual output, be it a poem to designing a rocket. To make a long story short I stopped just short of telling them to stick it. I told them it’s unfathomable, in writing, and eventually resigned 1.5 years later on my own terms. One other non-signer resigned one month after they started this, all other’s caved.
Since MDN always likes to quote Franklin, thinking he only believed in the 4th, there is the whole concept of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”. Yes! Even against Apple.