Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

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This often happens ingenuously, not out of calculated ill intent. Coders will keep code snippets and thoughts in personal knowledge tools like Notion, and then reuse them in different companies. Or contractors will straight up copy and paste code from source files of projects they worked on for different companies, thinking "I wrote it, so I could write it again, but why bother?", or something along those lines. People don't usually brag about these things, but they do come to light in random conversations.

This is exactly what happened here:

> According to Valeo's complaint, Mohammad Moniruzzaman, an engineer for NVIDIA who used to work for its company, had mistakenly showed its source code files on his computer as he was sharing his screen during a meeting with both firms in 2022

In most cases, these people are asked to remove all such code from the codebase and never do it again, but news about this rarely reaches the executive level. Usually, there aren't clear rules that it's supposed to be reported, so low level managers handle it the best they can. Of course, this guy got caught in very unusual circumstances.

It is also very unfortunate to be the software engineer who notices others doing this, because it puts you in a whistleblower's dilemma. The upper management does not want to be implicated in this and they do not want to know. Besides, informing them would definitely lead to the coder's firing. What is worse, many programmers see liberal use of IP as "not a big deal". So you would be perceived as causing problems for upper management, and getting people fired for "petty" reasons. It can sink your career in most companies if you witness this and it gets out. There are laws that protect whistleblowers from being let go sometimes, but it's not conducive to anyone's career growth to remain in the company because they cannot be fired.

The screen sharing incident is not the important thing that happened here. From the article:

> Moniruzzaman allegedly gave his personal email unauthorized access to Valeo's systems to steal "tens of thousands of files" and 6GB of source code shortly after that development. He then left Valeo a few months later and took the stolen information with him when he was given a senior position at NVIDIA, the complaint reads.

what about this:

>Valeo said its former employee admitted to stealing its software and that German police found its documentation and hardware pinned on Moniruzzaman's walls when his home was raided. According to Bloomberg, he was already convicted of infringement of business secrets in a German court and was ordered to pay €14,400 ($15,750) in September.

Some people think it's not a big deal. I don't know why.

> paste code from source files of projects they worked on for different companies

I wonder what would happen if legal action started between two companies and it turned out a coder pasted code from personal projects that predates both.

INAL (so take this with the pinch of salt that it comes from someone just thinking out loud), but I think it would depend on a number of factors such as how novel the code was, and how integral the code is (just to name two factors)

If the code was something as simple as let’s say leftpad for a simple example, it could be argued that it’s not the “meat” of the application so those few lines can not by themselves be copyrighted but the whole work (or even larger portions of it) can be.

If it was some special sauce algorithm, it could be argued under their work contract that the employee assigned copyright of the code of the personal project to the first employer they did the work for.

It also depends on the status of the employee, the contract of the employee, and the jurisdiction of both employee/employee.

A “full fledged” employee work is often deemed as the companies property if done under the course of their employment. A contractor in the US is about the same, however in the UK a contractor by default can retain the copyright of the “work product” unless stipulated otherwise in the work contract (so most contracts will state that you as a contractor are assigning copyright for the work you do to the company).

So in that last case it could be argued that the coder still owns the copyright but licenses the use to both parties. It would then be a case of the two companies maybe suing the coder for selling code they may have represented as given them an exclusive license to it, but obv didn’t because it was licensed to multiple companies.

>I wonder what would happen if legal action started between two companies and it turned out a coder pasted code from personal projects that predates both.

Highly unlikely. This was no FOSS web library he was working on, but some relatively cutting edge embedded automotive stuff, which few people do in their free time as a side project to put on github.

And anyway, according to most industry contracts and work laws, whatever code you check in your employer's systems during work hours and using work equipment, automatically now becomes your employer's code which you now can't share anymore.

You can easily add terms to employment contracts that grant non-exclusive license to code you own that you use in the course of employment. I've done it many times. The only issue that has come up out of this is when someone wants a warrant of exclusivity downstream of that, but that has never been a showstopper.

Isn’t it almost always much better in acquisitions that the acquired company owns all of their code? I have been told so many times. Apparently the valuation is significantly impacted if they do not.

My Director of Development once explained to me that our company rented all its offices; that its only assets (other than people) was its code; and people can leave. He was scrupulous about keeping GPL out of the codebase.

Companies use tons of open source code, it isn’t any different than that. And in many cases, these were huge companies, not startups. It was a shortcut to reimplementing the same code. No valuation impact.

For most contractual agreements you assign copy-write of your work to your employer. So if you used your personal project in work for your employer the copy-write becomes theirs.

My guess is that in your hypothetical scenario the first company would own the IP and could sue the worker or other company for infringement.

>Coders will keep code snippets and thoughts in personal knowledge tools like Notion,

Do they? I’ve never personally done such a thing, though I may keep some code in public GitHub repos. I’ve rewritten quite a bit of the same logic at most places I’ve worked over the years.

I’ve seen it happen, including other employees telling me I should make sure to zip up my code before I left (which I would never do). It’s only been at the earlier companies I worked for with many devs of questionable skill level. I’m not sure what’s behind the mentality, I assumed the act of writing decent code was challenging to them or it was perhaps something they were proud of, but maybe it’s also some misplaced sense of ownership. At one company I’ve experienced a dev asking back printouts of a design for a CRM at the end of a presentation, I assumed it was “borrowed” from their last job (thankfully we went a different direction). But regardless it definitely is a thing.

> I’ve rewritten quite a bit of the same logic at most places I’ve worked over the years.

Same here. I’ve learned to enjoy it, like perfecting a craft.

Or worse, they may just remember how they coded it last time and code it the same, or only remember subconsciously and code it the same without knowing.

Someday there will be technology to erase all memory of work you did in service of your corporate overlords and you’ll be able to start with a true clean slate at every job.

> Someday there will be technology to erase all memory of work you did in service of your corporate overlords and you’ll be able to start with a true clean slate at every job.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11280740

Or

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0338337/

Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, available here:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20150419135441/http://american-b...>.

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