And he did sign an Intellectual Property Agreement, which is included in the filing on page 15.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/12/10/apple_v_gerard_williams.pd...
And Apple is not alleging violations of their IP. They are alleging that he learned non-Apple-IP things during his time at Apple and is now using that knowledge at his new company.
Ah yes, because they have money and power. Sounds familiar.
I think I get the argument – "how could society function if every employee were allowed to actively sabotage the company they worked for?" – I just don't buy it. Most people have no interest in doing such things. The law of large numbers seems to guarantee it won't be a big problem in practice. And I'm more in the "Let employees have civil liberties" camp than "Let companies protect themselves from any conceivable harm." And besides, we have a clear remedy for employees who sabotage their companies: fire them.
From a cursory reading, it sounds like this person used his technical expertise to go start a startup, and tried to recruit some of his peers to leave their cushy bigco job and go help him. Y'know who else did that? Shockley Semiconductor.
Steve Jobs himself also recruited some folks from Apple when he left to found Next.
"Over the previous six months, Jobs had kept in contact with some of the senior staff in the Macintosh division, even after Gassée took control. Five of these staffers agreed to become cofounders of the new company with Jobs. Chief among these were Bud Tribble, Susan Barnes, and Dan’l Lewin." [1]
"After several months of being sidelined, Jobs resigned from Apple on September 13, 1985. He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him." [2]
He also intended on licensing the tech to Apple, according to those sources.
[1] https://lowendmac.com/2013/next-years-steve-jobs-before-triu...
He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him
and
He also intended on licensing the tech to Apple, according to those sources.
i.e The board were both acknowledged and have a common interest.
Employees do not owe their employers their undivided loyalty.
The lowest-level employees don't owe their employer anything when their shift ends. They're free to work for a competitor for the next 8 hours if they choose.
Salaried employees generally don't owe their employer anything once they leave the office and stop work for the day...though only in a few states like CA are workers granted explicit protections for their extracurricular ventures.
Only executives might owe undivided loyalty, and even then that is a provision of the employment contract that must be explicitly negotiated and paid for by the employer.
May be in CA, but many part of the world this is not true.
>Only executives might owe undivided loyalty, and even then that is a provision of the employment contract that must be explicitly negotiated and paid for by the employer.
Which is exactly what is happening. He was only two or three level below Tim Cook.
Non-solicit clauses in contracts are commonplace and I've never met someone in CA who doesn't think they have legitimacy. If he was dumb enough to directly solicit instead of making himself available for people to reach out to, if they chose to, that's on him. But I'd like to know if this is an invalid folk-belief.
In CA, soliciting your fellow employees is perfectly permissible. As of 2019, this is a blanket rule for all employees, including executives, because courts have determined that non-solicit clauses violates multiple CA labor laws (including the prohibition on non-competes).
However, executives may be subject to non-compete clauses in their employment contract. Executives, as highly-compensated employees, are exempt from CA prohibitions on non-compete clauses. Solicitation activity might violate the non-compete if the executive is going into a new business that directly competes with the actual activities of the old employer, but as a practical matter this can't really occur since the executive couldn't take the new job until after the non-compete period ends.
https://www.law.com/therecorder/2019/06/11/employee-nonsolic...
Edit: above was paywalled, and I didn't realize I was trial-viewing it. Think this is free for all:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5993e280-c03b...
They were only questionably enforceable before too, since they still amounted to a contract restriction limiting someone's employment opportunities (in this case, the person being recruited).
While CA does codify non-competes (and now non-solicits) are void, general interpretation was that any restrictive contract clause wasn't going to fly in court except under very specific circumstances. CA takes a very dim view of restricting job mobility.
Ethically, totally slack if he recruited while still employed, of course, and if he literally did it at work I suspect he'll run into a "using company resources (time, building, hipchat channel, etc)" issue, which is one of the things that severely weakens a defense that whatever you do yourself, you still own.
No idea how or if that applies at a high-level action like starting a company, but if he had any technical contribution I could definitely see it coming up.
> while employed at Apple
That's the key. You can solicit after you aren't employed by the company. But that isn't the case here.
In CA it's always been legal to solicit employees after you left your old job. Recent court cases simply clarified that this has always been the case, and that the same law invalidating non-competes applies to non-solicits.
And the 2019 case explicitly says that a non-solicit applying during the term of employment was illegal as a matter of CA law.