I’d bet my house that the founder just pissed off some big Apple guy, probably took some talent with him when he left, so now they’re throwing the book at him.
>Apple is additionally charging Williams with luring away other Apple engineers, also allegedly in breach of his contract.
"The best people are the ones that understand content. They are a pain in the butt to manage but you put up with it because they are so good at content."
Only insider would know, but watching it from the outside it seems there are quite a bit of power grab across Apple.
What VC wants to spend their early money on lawsuits, even if you’ll (eventually) win?
It’s unhelpful to fall into the trap of thinking the Valley is any better than any other place.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
Still I think this is a bad look for Apple.
None of this is new; Apple has always been like this (even in the Jobs 1.0 days).
https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-amazons-own-numbers-reveal-sta... (independent)
https://www.revealnews.org/article/behind-the-smiles/ (joint article with The Atlantic)
I'm not stating that Apple is good (just look at Foxconn suicide rates as proof that it's an evil company), but it's generally speaking the lesser of three evils here.
You're welcome to participate on Hacker News if you want to submit stories and post comments about topics that gratify your intellectual curiosity. That is, you'd be welcome to participate as a true community member. But single-purpose accounts aren't allowed here, and certainly not single-purpose accounts for corporate agendas.
What are you counting, and how are you counting it?
Why do you think the rate of death at Foxconn is any different to any other large manufacturing company?
Suicide is a leading cause of death in every single country in the world (albeit it doesn't always appear to be so because of the way it's counted) and so when you have a very large employer you're going to see many deaths in their workforce.
Every death by suicide is a tragedy for that person and their loved ones, but I'm not seeing anything that says Foxconn have unusually large rates of deaths.
For me (even if they would offer me a job, which they probably would not) the second worst would be the extreme secrecy and the worst would be the absolute prohibition of outside projects, even open source unless it were explicitly my job.
Wait, what? If you work at Apple, you are absolutely prohibited from having outside projects, even open source projects that are explicitly not a part of your job?
That's so surprising to me that it feels like it can't possibly be true. The best hackers all have some kind of open source projects, and Apple feels very supportive of open source work. How could they attract the best talent unless they were fine with people building open source projects?
Apple is quite supportive of Open Source in an official capacity. I would actually say that the best talent almost certainly does not work on Open Source projects in their spare time (though quite a few talented people do get paid to work on Open Source projects). The "best talent" tends to have other hobbies outside of coding -- well-rounded individuals make better team members, especially when working with non-technical team members. A lot of young engineers don't appreciate this until they're older.
I remember reading in the Walter Isaacson's biography. Jobs would purposefully underpay or deny bonuses to top employees, especially top contributors to the products.
This kind of a behaviour comes puts up a giant red flag. Do only as much as what it takes to not get fired.
Provided they didn't take insider knowledge and intellectual property with them, of course.
And that is exactly what Apple's legal filing claims...
Say you assembled a great team of specialists. It cost you a lot of effort, time and money to hire all these really great people. Then someone comes along with a wad of cash and convinces a bunch of those people to all quit and work on a secret project. After they come out of stealth mode, it becomes clear they worked on the same thing as they did at Apple, only now Apple has to pay $250 million dollar to get the results of the work of the team that they had put a lot of effort into recruiting in the first place...
This is the market pricing the work. If someone else came along with a wad of cash and hired them, you weren’t paying them enough.
It is a way of providing engineering bonuses without messing up the internal politics.
I have a neighbor who did this twice. Apparently that's not that common: I mentioned that in a random conversation once and the person I was talking to said "Oh, you live near XXX?"
That tied to some claims that he's utilizing some Apple IP. Looks like he may have been doing a lot of the work on his startup based on his work at Apple - and potentially sandbagging his work there and stashing the goods under his new umbrella - (my interpretation apparently he said he was developing technology that Apple needs)
There's enough here that seems outside of the protections that CA affords.
That said, nobody I know over 30 who works in tech does their "side projects" in tech anymore. We've all moved on to kids or hobbies that allow us to escape the tech world like music or painting.
(IANAL; TINLA)
Now, now enforceable it is often depends, but the Oculus case is just one major example of how a company can assert ownership of IP created outside of work hours.
Right, I was addressing the OP who said that full time employment means that your employer owns the intellectual property you create on your own time, which isn't the case by default.
Every company started by someone uses experience they've generated at a previous job. These contracts effectively make anyone starting a company a breach of contract. And just because it's in a contract, doesn't mean it can't be thrown out by a judge if the terms are too unreasonable. These terms are too unreasonable.
Also the concept of "intellectual property" is so misunderstood and abused by the legal system. Originally it was meant to prevent people from writing books that tail on the success of another person's work, like trying to get paid for harry potter fan fiction. It doesnt mean that after being a fiction writer for one publisher the publisher subsequently owns all fictional writing you do for the rest of your life. Prince should've had to change his name to Artist just so he could write music again. Maybe Nuvia's CEO needs to needs to change his name too just so he can continue making microchips.
No-one (at least I don't think anyone) is suggesting that knowledge, experience and skills belong to your employer.
But if I'm a video game developer, and I invent a new shading technique for video game graphics while I'm employed at BigGameCo (whether at home or at work), and I have signed a contract that assigns ownership of my inventions to BigGameCo, then that contract is generally enforceable (again, according to my non-lawyer understanding) and that invention belongs to BigGameCo.
I'm not trying to say the line is always going to be clear but skills/experience/knowledge is fine; work-product is not. Bring your sales know-how; not your Rolodex. Bring your software architecture chops; not design documentation; etc.
That's the whole argument. There's literally no other argument. There is no separation between "previous body of work" and "experience, skills, or knowledge." I think you missed the, "Prince had to change his name to Artist formerly known as prince just so he could continue making music," analogy. That's exactly what's going on here.
>But if I'm a video game developer, and I invent a new shading technique for video game graphics while I'm employed at BigGameCo (whether at home or at work)...
If you're a pioneer in shaders, it's because you've spent years of time and effort trying to understand the problems associated with this one specialized field. You are going to continue being a pioneer in shaders long after you leave your current employer, because that's where you are the most competitive, because that's where all of your knowledge, experience and skills are. To change fields now would be career suicide. You would no longer be a specialist. Your years of knowledge and experience in shaders would lose all value if you decided to dig ditches/whatever alt line of work you go into, and that's what these contracts are forcing you to do: brave a job market where you have no advantage for your time spent at your previous company.
Under these types of contracts, you're not allowed to move forward with your career trajectory after leaving a company. You would be building off your previous work that you did with them, and you're approaching problems with the same solutions you already came up with. That means your old employer owns the rights to all of your subsequent work. Same thing happens to musicians. Since every song they write is an iteration of their previous body of work, if musicians try to leave their record label and can be sued for the rights to every subsequent song they write. Prince had this happen and changed his name to "Artist formerly known as prince." to skirt around the contract. Ridiculous solution to a ridiculous problem. At the time I just thought Prince was being crazy. Apparently not.
I'm also not talking about what types of contracts have been enforced in the past, obviously these companies keep trying to use these contracts because there is precedent, but there's precedent for fucking everything in this country and I could write a historiography of court-ordered fuckery if need be. What im trying to say is that these types of contracts have been thrown out in the past for being unreasonable, and should all be thrown out in the future. This was not the intended spirit of any law allowing people to own "intellectual property."
If the contract they signed with Herman Miller expressly forbade them from doing this, yes, I can totally imagine that. The problem isn't the side project, per se -- it's starting a side project that is in direct or indirect competition with your employer. If you work in the Alexa group at Amazon, for instance, they're probably not going to care about a "side project" of selling sparkly pony dolls on Etsy, but if your "side project" is developing a new voice assistant, you're going to have a problem.
I’m lucky my employer has a really fair moonlighting policy (basically, I can’t use company equipment for my outside projects and I can’t get paid to talk about stuff I explicitly learned at work), but many large tech companies assign ownership to any code you write, whether it’s a side project or not.
So that's not a "just". That's something he deserves to be sued and heavily penalized for.
So yes. You can be sued for that. Obviously. Which is why he's getting sued.
Whether or not the litigant prevails depends on specific language of agreements, their enforcability, and the specific circumstances around the departures.
Did the engineer decide to quit on their own or were they persuaded by someone who otherwise agreed not to poach?
The issue discussed here is an employee agreement that prohibits former employees from poaching current employees.
I don't see how it doesn't fit this case.
I worked at an SaaS offering for market research surveys that was threatened with a lawsuit because we hired a software engineer who used to work phones in a call center that specialized in polling people. He signed the non-compete contract, obviously, but the point was to discourage him and other people from quitting, or their potential employers from hiring them.
The idea is to make illegal lawsuits against people who broke no laws, so as to set an example for other people who are thinking about quiting.
Am I reading that right?
Sued for making job offers to your ex colleagues ? Even in the US that wouldn't fly.
You are not owned by your employers. Anything else is like a turkey voting for christmas