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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

> While Carmack admitted to copying thousands of e-mails to a personal hard drive on his last day working for ZeniMax, he testified that he didn't use this code while at Oculus. Instead, Carmack says he rewrote the technology used in the Rift and Gear VR headsets from scratch and that the code he had written at ZeniMax wouldn't even work in the current Oculus headsets.

...

I don't think that excuse holds much water; leaving your employer with their code is often theft on its own right, but to then implement it again while plausibly using the stolen code as a reference? Oof.

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I don't think you understand intellectual property law.

> "leaving your employer with their code"

From how I understood it, he didn't necessarily copy the code to his personal hard drive, only the emails.

> "he rewrote the technology ... from scratch"

It's a lot tougher to argue that there is a misappropriation of IP if it's a clean room implementation. Code IS the intellectual property here (often, this is even explicitly stated in the standard PIIA agreement).

Now, Zenimax's only recourse is possible trade secret misappropriation, which is much harder to establish in court, given the lack of tangible evidence in the form of copied code.

That said, the State of California is particularly protective of workers' rights in this latter scenario, non-compete agreements are actually banned here.

No clean room implementation includes the person who wrote (or saw or used) the original code at another company. Also, email is company IP, or at least confidential info and/or trade secrets.

No.

(To both.) See my cousin post.

I'm a lawyer, and I continue to disagree.

Explain?

I explained above. Work email is likely to include at least confidential information, possibly trade secrets. If I attach a super secret drug formula to an email, do you think it stops being company IP?

As for clean room, there are attempts to reverse engineer that will fail, and then there are attempts that exclude everyone who was exposed to the original IP, which might have a chance of surviving at trial.

You may be a lawyer, sir, but I am two lawyers, stacked together in a trenchcoat in deference to one of the classic japes, and I can tell you that the things you are saying sound vaguely wrong to bottom lawyer.

From the article:

> he testified that he didn't use this code

I read that as implying that the emails included code. As a developer, my emails have included code; and it's not so surprising that his emails would have included code when he was working with an external party.

> if it's a clean room implementation

It cannot be a clean room implementation if the same individual is involved in the creation of both instances.

No. Emails are considered correspondence, not IP: https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-message-considered-intelle...

As for clean room implementations, that is true, except in California.

Here, it does not really hold in court at all:

You can leave one company to join another doing more or less the same thing (because non-competition clauses are banned here), as long as you do not copy the code itself.

It sounds like you and your uncle post are both programmers trying to look at things too much from a logically moral perspective, rather than actually how the courts view these things, since you aren't very familiar with the latter.

Are the attachments considered correspondence? If so, what's to prevent me from attaching all of the company's code to my email and later walking away with it?

Attachments are considered files, and generally courts don't react too friendly whenever they find out that you were trying to be clever and use some sort of "loophole" like that.

That's what I figured.

I don't think it's unlikely that among the thousands of emails Carmack downloaded on his last day, that some of those which involved working with an external developer would have included such attachments.

Yeah, that's a detail for the courts to resolve -- whether Carmack was downloading the emails Hillary Clinton style or not.

I think it is safe to say the emails have nothing to do with stealing code. He copied his email history so he could personally have it.

Lots of people do this when leaving a job, even when they are not supposed to. It is your correspondence for the last X number of years, you want a personal copy.

Carmack would have a greater incentive to copy the emails since he clearly was blurring the lines between personal work and private work while working for id which was inherited by zenimax when they bought id.

Sure, and that's probably part of the reason why emails aren't considered intellectual property.

I don't think California is the relevant jurisdiction here.

The quote from ZeniMax in the article is "With the start of the trial of our case in Federal District Court in Dallas [...]"

Carmack lives and works in Texas. In fact I think (though I don't have a citation for it) Carmack's choice to stay in Texas is the reason Oculus has a Dallas office. Of course Oculus and Facebook headquarters are in California. ZeniMax headquarters (according to Wikipedia) are in Maryland.

The parties always strive to get the most favorable jurisdiction for their cases.

That is why Samsung built an ice skating rink in front of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas -- to lobby the judges who heavily favor patent holders -- literally thousands of patent infringement suits are filed in this particular court because of this.

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