A federal judge in California has allowed Apple’s lawsuit against startup Rivos Inc. to proceed, alleging that Rivos poached Apple engineers and stole trade secrets used to develop its chip designs.
Patricia Hurtado and Malathi Nayak for Bloomberg News:
US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose said Apple had “sufficiently identified” a trade secret and alleged “sufficient harm” by Rivos and three former employees. The judge rejected Rivos’s request to dismiss a Defend Trade Secrets act claim as well as a breach of contract claim against five former Apple employees.
The dispute revolves around “system-on-chip” technology that shrinks multiple computer elements into a small chip, which Apple says it has invested billions of dollars in to make its devices more powerful.
Apple claimed in the suit filed last year that Rivos, which has hired dozens of Apple engineers, began a
“coordinated campaign” in June 2021 to target its employees.The former employees left and joined Rivos after stealing “highly-sensitive” proprietary and trade secret information about Apple’s “system-on-chip” designs…
MacDailyNews Note: The case is Apple Inc., a California Corporation v. Rivos, Inc. et al, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 5:22-cv-02637.
Interns, start your engines! Prost, everyone! 🍻🍻🍻
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Why are engineers so easily enticed to leave Apple’s hardware development team and take “secrets” with them? Is it a pay issue? Is it a management issue? Something is seriously amiss in that department and needs to be rectified. Most new employees are highly loyal when they join a company and it takes some serious malfeasance to ‘trash’ that loyalty. What’s up with this Apple?
This would not be a strategy for retribution because of bad working conditions. This is about money, greed and a sense that they would not be caught for stealing. Just my thoughts.
We don’t know what sort of deal they were offered. In a different industry i know of people who were head hunted for a combination of a very high salary together with equity in the new company.
That can be a very tempting proposition, but the guy I know declined the offer as he felt that his industry was a small world and everybody who mattered would know that he behaved like that.
You need to be sure that the company you move to will still be around for long enough to make it worthwhile so that you don’t need to rely on your reputation to get another job soon.
Maybe the question to ask is, why does Apple seem to be on the plaintiff side more often than other similarly-situation companies? Could it be that the Apple, more than others, is trying to stomp out competitive players using litigation tactics that leverage their huge cash reserves?
It’s simple to explain. No amount of salary or loyalty is good enough in Silicon Valley where the game is to start a “start up” based on technology from a previous company you worked at and be awarded many thousands of shares in that company and act as a “founder”. It’s about status and greed achieved by using tech stolen from your previous employer. The whole point is to act like you created the tech and then sell the stolen tech to some competitor of Apple, like Qualcomm or Samdung or such.